Content is Not Acessible at All With a Mobile Device! Sité’s Will No Longer be Indexable After July 5th
Google will stop indexing of websites that are not functional on mobile devices after July 5th, 2024. John Mueller from Google stated, “If your site’s content cannot be accessed at all using a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable.”
Action: Make sure that your website is accessible on mobile devices and verify its functionality using the Google Search Console URL Inspection tool.
Mobile Indexing v Last Final Final Doc on June 3, 2024 – Google
“We’re embarking on our final last step (that’s the plan!) of our migration to a mobile-first index for Google Search: the small set of sites we’ve still been crawling with desktop Googlebot will be crawled with mobile Googlebot after July 5, 2024. Don’t worry, most websites don’t need to do anything!”
As google mentioned in our last update on mobile indexing, Google crawls and indexes almost all websites using a smartphone crawler. Over the years, the number of sites that aren’t accessible on mobile has continued to shrink. To simplify our systems, and to make it easier for sites to debug issues related to device types, Google will soon crawl all sites for Search with the Googlebot Smartphone crawler.
The largest part of the web is already being crawled like this, and there is no change in crawling for these sites. After July 5, 2024, Google will crawl and index these sites with only Googlebot Smartphone. If your site’s content is not accessible at all with a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable.
You may still find Googlebot Desktop in your server logs and reporting. For example, among a few other Search features, Googlebot Desktop is sometimes used when crawling for product listings and Google for Jobs.
Last Update on Mobile Indexing on October 31, 2023
“It’s been a long road, getting from there to here. We’re delighted to announce that the trek to Mobile First Indexing is now complete.”
Google Search started focusing more and more on mobile devices starting in 2015, with the mobile friendly update. Then, in 2016, we started mobile-first crawling and indexing. This allowed Google Search to index the content that users would see, when they access the website on their mobile phone. Crawling and indexing as a smartphone was a big change for Google’s infrastructure, but also a change for the public web: a mobile web page now needed to be as complete as the corresponding desktop version.
Over the years, mobile web traffic has continued to grow; in some regions, people almost exclusively use their phone to access the internet. Google appreciated to site-owners, SEOs, web-developers, designers, and everyone who works on websites — for helping to make the mobile web a success!
Next steps
We currently know of a very small set of sites which do not work on mobile devices at all. The error types we’ve seen there are primarily that the page shows errors to all mobile users, that the mobile version of the site is blocked with robots.txt while the desktop version is allowed for crawling, or that all pages on the mobile site redirect to the homepage. These are issues that Google can’t resolve. We’ll continue to try to crawl these sites with our legacy desktop Googlebot crawler for the time being, and will re-evaluate the list a few times a year. For more information, check out our mobile indexing best practices.
Additionally, Google will continue to reduce our crawling with legacy desktop Googlebot as much as possible. This helps to save resources for site-owners, and for Google.
Search Console Changes
With the move to Mobile First Indexing behind Search Engine, google is also turning off the indexing crawler information in the settings page in Search Console. This information is no longer needed since all websites that work on mobile devices are now being primarily crawled with our mobile crawler. The crawl stats report shows how your site is currently being crawled, if you’re curious.