What is mobile-first indexing?

Mobile-first indexing means that Google mainly uses the mobile version of a website to index and evaluate its content. Google now does this for virtually all websites. If the mobile version has less text, fewer images or less structured data than the desktop version, that difference counts against you.

Why is mobile-first indexing important?

Mobile comes first: whatever is missing from your phone version cannot be taken into account.
Equal content: text, headings and links should be the same on mobile and desktop.
Accessibility: pages that do not work on mobile risk not being indexed properly.

Examples of mobile-first indexing

A responsive website that shows the same content on every screen
A store whose mobile version shortens or hides the product description
A mobile site with fewer internal links than the desktop version

How do you use mobile-first indexing?

Build your website responsively and check that important text, images, links and structured data are also present on mobile. Test your pages on a real phone and in Google Search Console. Read more under technical SEO.

Mobile-first indexing