Google’s latest lightning talk In a video series, Martin Splitt identifies the main problems site owners encounter with mobile-first indexing.
Google Lightning Talks are short presentations given at the Google Webmaster Conference.
Given that in-person events are canceled for the foreseeable future, Google is adapting conference content to the web.
In this presentation on mobile-first indexing, Splitt discusses common issues site owners face and carefully explains how to fix or avoid them.
Common issues with mobile-first indexing
The most common issues related to mobile-first indexing can be grouped into two categories.
1. Mobile crawl issues
Google crawling with the mobile version of Googlebot can cause problems.
For example, a request may be handled differently by a server based on user agent.
Or maybe something goes wrong when sending a request to the mobile page.
In that case, little or no information is available to Google from the page.
This means that Google can’t get the signals it needs to show your page in search results.
2. Mobile page content issues
Other issues may be related to the content itself.
This is especially true if your site has separate mobile pages that serve different content than the desktop version.
If Google receives less information from your page, it will not be able to properly determine the relevance of your page.
This prevents Google from ranking your site higher in search results.
How to avoid these issues
To avoid problems for Google when crawling mobile pages, ensure the following:
- Don’t block Googlebot crawling with ‘Disallow’ directives in robots.txt
- Don’t use the noindex meta tag
- Don’t block Googlebot from crawling mobile CSS
- Don’t block Googlebot from following internal links
Site owners should not only check for robots.txt directives, noindex and nofollow tags, but also the crawling capacity of their servers.
Ideally, your server should be able to handle as many desktop crawls as mobile crawls.
mobile page content
Splitt reminds site owners that page content when viewed on mobile should be the same as when viewed on desktop.
Site owners can run into problems when intentionally hiding content on mobile.
For example, some mobile pages require the user to expand the displayed content.[もっと見る]You may have to tap a button.
Googlebot does not interact with page elements, so this should be avoided. So you can only crawl what you can see right away.
If Googlebot sees minimal content, it will not be able to rank your pages properly.
Keeping content identical on mobile and desktop should avoid mobile-first indexing issues.
it includes maintaining can not see Some parts of the page are the same, such as structured data and meta descriptions.
See the full Lightning Talk below.
Other Google Lightning Talks
If you missed our previous Lightning Talks, check out our recap here for the latest.
