There has been a lot of talk and presentations over the last year (Jon included!) about the shift to the Mobile Lead Index by Google. Lots of ideas have been formed, as well as opinions on what will happen made all over the world by various people. Jon's SearchLeeds talk brought together all the thoughts of the industry, make sure you are fully prepped to deal with this monumental shift as SEO’s and business, and most importantly give you a roadmap of work to do before it is too late!
15. HISTORY OF MOBILE
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WAP
HTML
1999 2007 2009 2014 2015 2017
Separate Mobile
Pages (Mobile Site
or Dynamic Delivery)
Responsive
Design
Deep App
Linking
AMP &
Progressive
Web Apps
Mobile-
first
Indexing
16. HISTORY OF MOBILE SEO CONFIGURATION
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Desktop
Mobile
Responsive
AMP pages
Mobile first
One version for desktop devices
One to rule them all - one version designed to work equally good
on desktop and mobile
Dedicated light weight version designed for a fast loading
Dedicated mobile pages served on a separate URL e.g. m.domain
or dynamically served on the same URL
Mobile becomes the PRIMARY version.
17. HOW DOES GOOGLE CRAWL DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONFIGURATION?
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Responsive Dynamic Separate
Mobile
Would expect Google to use both
user-agents on the same URL to
validate that the same content is
returned.
Google needs to crawl with both user
agents to validate the mobile version.
Hint: Use the Vary HTTP header!
Google needs to crawl the dedicated
mobile URLs with a mobile user agent to
validate the pages and confirm the
content matches the desktop pages.
18. DESKTOP + DEDICATED MOBILE + AMP
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Desktop
Page
INDEXABLE
AMP
Page
Rel=canonical
Rel=alternate amp
NON-INDEXABLE
www.domain.com
/shirts/amp
www.domain.com
/shirts/
Mobile
Page
m.domain.com
/shirts/
NON-INDEXABLE
Rel=canonical
Rel=alternate mobile
* The decision which page is shown for mobile users are
on the Google side
19. RESPONSIVE/DYNAMIC +AMP
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Responsive /
Dynamic
Page
INDEXABLE
AMP
Page
Rel=canonical
Rel=alternate amp
NON-INDEXABLE
www.domain.com
/shirts/amp
www.domain.com
/shirts/
* The decision which page is shown for mobile users are
on the Google side
25. “Our algorithms will eventually primarily
use the mobile version of a site’s
content to rank pages from that site, to
understand structured data, and to show
snippets from those pages in our results.”
THE MOBILE-FIRST INDEX AT WORK
-Google
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26. GOOGLE ALLOWS YOU TO CHECK
@jondmyers SearchLeeds https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
27. GOOGLE ALLOWS YOU TO CHECK
@jondmyers SearchLeeds https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
28. AND GIVES YOU BEST PRACTICE
@jondmyers SearchLeeds https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing#best-practices
29. Can it really be that easy???
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30. Google will NOT have a separate mobile
index, it is the same single index.
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35. EFFECTS ON SITE PERFORMANCE
Will keyword rankings be affected?
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36. EFFECTS ON SITE PERFORMANCE
Will keyword rankings be affected?
Yes, if your mobile content is reduced
and doesn’t contain terms the page was
previously ranking for on desktop.
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37. IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN RANKINGS
The following need to be consistent across desktop
and mobile:
Content
Metadata
Markup
Hreflang
Images
Alt attributes
Indexing rules
Canonical tags
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42. INTERNAL LINKING ON MOBILE
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Be mindful of orphaned pages, or
increased levels in site depth
which could be keeping search
engines away from your content.
44. What about External linking and the Google
Link Graph?
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45. Structured data will play a vital part in the
mobile-first world, and beyond.
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46. STRUCTURED DATA ON MOBILE
“The biggest challenge for mobile-first will be understanding
the lightweight needs of the user and applying this via
condensed content. Structured data and markup allows for
disambiguation when content is not so prevalent on a page in
an unstructured form.”
Dawn Anderson
MD, Move It Marketing
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50. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!
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https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-
measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/
51. FETCH TIMES
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Percentage of Majestic Million sites split by fetch time
Fetch time includes time taken to fetch URL and display the HTTP response.
This doesn’t include the time taken to request or run any associated
resources (such as images or scripts) on the page.
52. FETCH TIMES BY CONFIGURATION
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Dynamically servedResponsive Separate Mobile
Average fetch time by configuration (secs):
Separate mobile sites have the slowest fetch times.
Responsive sites have fastest fetch times of
three mobile configurations.
53. WHAT DOES GOOGLE SAY?
@jondmyers SearchLeeds Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/about/
54. PERFORMANCE PER VERTICAL
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https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-
measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/
55. PROBLEM MAY BE HERE??
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https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-
measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/
59. FOR RESPONSIVE SITES
1. Make sure important resources
aren’t being blocked e.g.
images, JS & CSS.
2. Check for legacy issues such as
existing dynamic or separate
mobile pages - these will be
indexed instead!
@jondmyers SearchLeeds
60. FOR DYNAMIC SITES
1. Check that the vary: user agent
HTTP header is in use.
2. Make sure the right user agent
is being served the correct
version of a page, whether that’s
mobile or desktop.
@jondmyers SearchLeeds
61. FOR SEPARATE MOBILE SITES
1. Guide the mobile and desktop
user agents to the correct page
version with 301 redirects.
2. Make sure your servers have
capacity to handle increased
crawl rate from Googlebot
Smartphone.
@jondmyers SearchLeeds
62. FOR ALL SITES
1. Test robots.txt files to make sure Googlebot
Smartphone can access your mobile setup.
2. Check your mobile configuration for any
display or UX issues.
3. Test mobile-first readiness by using SEO tools
that support mobile crawling.
@jondmyers SearchLeeds
65. AMP PAGES
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▪ Google is backing the AMP page quite
hard
▪ Google preloads AMP pages, images,
and scripts to force them to be fast
▪ Not just for news: AMP added support
for accepting payments via Android
pay, opening the way for ecommerce
websites which are 100% AMP
https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/7623
66. AMP PAGES WORK…THE PROOF
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▪ In A/B testing the AMP experience versus the responsive
experience with AdWords traffic, they saw a 20 to 30
percent conversion lift on AMP pages across all mobile
campaigns.
▪ More than 70 percent of the 100,000 ad groups in their
mobile AdWords campaigns pointed only to AMP pages.
That’s now at 100 percent.
▪ AMP pages from organic traffic are converting at a 100
percent lift over responsive and the bounce rate is 10%
lower.
72. SPOTTING IF YOU HAVE SWITCHED
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• Traditionally desktop
crawler would do about
80% of the crawling and
mobile 20%
• This will flip when you are
switched over!
• Monitor your logs!
74. TO LEARN MORE
Read our comprehensive
mobile-first white paper:
http://deepcrawl.actonservice
.com/acton/media/31628/mo
bile-first-indexing-whitepaper
@jondmyers SearchLeeds
75. GO BEYOND THIS WITH PWA’s
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Progressive Web Apps is:
• Progressive
• Responsive
• App-like
• And more...
Progressive Web Apps can fall
back to AMP.
• Hint… first load as AMP.
You should think about it now.
Progressive Web Apps is
THE FUTURE.