Google Search to rank sites by their mobile versions

San Francisco: Google has announced that starting July 1, all new websites would be analysed and ranked on Search on the basis of "mobile-first indexing".

"Mobile-first indexing" means Google would consider the mobile version of any new website for evaluating, indexing and ranking the site, instead of the desktop version which was used primarily.

"We`re happy to announce that `mobile-first indexing` will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search websites, starting July 1, 2019," John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Google, wrote in a blog-post on Tuesday.

For older and existing websites, Google would determine their readiness for "mobile-first indexing" based on the parity of content including text, images, videos, links and structured data as well as other meta-data-like titles and descriptions.

"We will notify them through Search Console once they`re seen as being ready. Since the default state for new websites will be `mobile-first indexing`, there`s no need to send a notification," Mueller said.

Google said it is pleased to see that "mobile-first indexing" has come a long way.

"We`re happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents," Muller said.