Video Editor: Arunabh Chowdhury
India is way ahead in some aspects of technology compared to the US. Take internet access for instance. In India, according to a 2018 report by Statista, 79 percent of internet access was through mobile devices, while in the US it was just under 40 percent. The global average is 52 percent content being accessed on mobile phones.
So, it’s only fair that search engines like Google switch to mobile-first indexing, which begins 1 July onwards. What’s that? When a new website is registered from now on, Google’s search engine will crawl its content and mobile-friendly content will be used to index its pages.
What does that mean?
Search results you get on Google will now drive you to mobile versions of the page directly and these sites will appear higher in ranking.
Google had started doing this last year itself when it started tracking page loading speed in July 2018 to determine a page’s mobile search ranking.
So if you have a blog or a site, it would help to make it mobile friendly. Although many sites show the same content on desktop and mobile, it is those that have a responsive design – where the site displays according to the device it is accessed from – that are likely to rank higher. You can check for mobile-first indexing of a site by using a URL inspection tool in the search console box.
For India especially, where data is the cheapest in the world at just about 17 rupees a gigabite and the average smartphone user uses 9.8 GB of data monthly, it makes sense that sites become mobile friendly to cater to this fast-growing mobile population.