Google’s recent experiments point to a wider shift in how the company will utilise ranking signals in future. The major change we’re seeing is that Google will primarily use it’s mobile-first index rather than taking ranking signals from the desktop version of websites.
This change almost feels a little late when you consider that Google confirmed that there were more mobile searches than desktop almost 18 months ago.
At the moment, a “mobile-friendly” adjustment is carried out for searchers on mobile. These changes would see a “heavier” version of that adjustment become the default across all devices.
Google have indicated that this mobile-first approach will be coming soon but still requires testing and experimentation until they’re confident the update will retain a good user experience. Stay tuned…