How to Prepare for Google's Mobile-First Index Change

If you follow the SEO industry, you’ve likely heard that Google has begun testing its Mobile-First Index. If not, the short-version is Google currently indexes both the Desktop and Mobile versions of your website based on the Desktop version. Google now plans to flip that and begin indexing your Desktop & Mobile versions based on the Mobile version of your website.

“Awesome. So what?”

Well, for those of you with a standard Responsive or Dynamic Serving website, there isn’t much to worry about as quoted by the Google Webmaster Blog:

If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the primary content and markup is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have to change anything.

Seems you can sit back and relax.

But I don’t have a responsive website though…

For those of you with a website that serves different markup to mobile and desktop and feel that your organic search results are important, the Mobile-First Index is another signal that Google is looking to push website owners further towards a responsive standard for the web. At this point, if you run a website, you’ve likely had to field the “Why aren’t we responsive yet?”question. And if you haven’t, the Mobile First Index test is a great conversation starter for a move to Responsive. With that in mind, I’ve put together the below list of guides that can get you on the right path towards avoiding penalties when Google pushes the Mobile First Index live in 2017.