Google has executed its final mobile-first indexing change at this time, a six-year course of

Google began its efforts to maneuver websites over to mobile-first indexing over six and a half years in the past. At present, Google confirmed these efforts are actually executed, and the final batch of web sites eligible for mobile-first indexing have been moved over.

Affirmation. John Mueller from Google confirmed at this time was the final batch on Mastodon at this time after I reported there was a massive batch of sites moved to mobile-first indexing previously a number of hours. John stated that this was the “final batch!”

Not all websites moved. John added that there’ll nonetheless be a “tiny handful of web sites that actually don’t work on cell are left.” These remaining websites, he stated, will “simply be crawled with desktop Googlebot going ahead.”

Notifications. At present, a variety of SEOs observed that websites which were on desktop-first indexing had been notified they had been moved to mobile-first indexing. Here’s a screenshot from Richard Hearne he posted on Twitter:

Historical past. As a reminder, Google began mobile-first indexing over 6.5 years in the past, and finally, after publishing deadline after deadline, Google eliminated the deadline. Google first launched mobile-first indexing again in November 2016, and by December 2018, half of all websites in Google’s search outcomes had been from mobile-first indexing. Cell-first indexing merely signifies that Google will crawl your web site from the eyes of a cell browser and use that cell model for indexing and rating.

Google in early March 2020, earlier than all of the lockdowns started throughout many of the world, introduced the deadline for all websites to change over to mobile-first indexing can be September 2020. At the moment, Google stated, “To simplify, we’ll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all web sites beginning September 2020.”  Then in July 2020, Google moved that deadline as soon as once more to March 2021.

Why we care. So in case your web site has not but been moved to mobile-first indexing, then it would by no means transfer to mobile-first indexing. Oh, all new websites by default, ought to be listed over mobile-first indexing. The difficulty is, John said, websites that weren’t moved over “don’t work with cell user-agents in any respect.”

This took so much longer than anybody anticipated, however the course of appears to be formally now executed.