Mobile First Indexing has been delayed from September 2020 to March 2021 due to COVID. New domains are already set to Mobile First; however, old domains will be transitioned over at that time.

What does Mobile First indexing mean?

Mobile first is a reference to the bot (crawler) that looks at your site and lets google knows what it means. As of a few years ago Google developed an independent crawler that was for mobile devices. They weigh elements differently, pay attention to distance between clickable elements, page load time, viewport and much more. However, search listings were still largely based on the crawl of the desktop site. Beginning March 2021, that is no longer the case.

Mobile before Desktop

We need to be cognizant of former best practices to hide content, images and even block certain pages from the mobile view to increase usability. However, if that content is blocked on mobile, it will no longer be indexed and Google will not know it exists.

Image indexing will be based off of the mobile crawl of the website, so if you only have low quality images on the mobile site, you will only have low quality images being indexed. Lazy Loading becomes the most effective way to do this, but don’t hide images behind a button to “see more images” as Googlebot won’t press this button and the content won’t be indexed.

Related Google Guides

• Here’s a guide to Lazy Loading best practices per Google
• Here’s Google’s guide to Mobile First Indexing best practices per Google