Google’s reportedly ramping up for a major shift in the way its search engine works, which will see the creation of separate mobile and desktop indexes.
The move hasn’t been confirmed by the company, but it’s an extension of its ongoing campaign to push website owners and developers to optimise sites for mobile users as a priority. If it goes ahead with creating a new priority mobile index that’s updated much more frequently than its ‘secondary’ desktop index, it’ll severly impact any sites that haven’t yet been optimised for mobile.
Gary Ilyes, a Google Webmaster Trends analyst, spilled the beans of the upcoming change at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, saying that the dual-index approach is due to be implemented in the next few months.
Whether or not that date is accurate, if you have a website that’s not mobile optimised, you’re already missing out on Google traffic (and therefore business) simply by not being mobile-friendly. With smartphone penetration still growing around the world, the number of mobile queries isn’t about to go down anytime soon.
An entirely separate index could also, potentially, be a boon for users. If Google can surface more accurate results because it can update its index more reliably for mobile sites, the results you get for each query should improve too.
Google told The Guardian that it had no news to share at this time, but frequently experiments with how its index works.
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Are you going to suffer as a result of this impending search index change or do you just want better results on mobile? Let us know in the comments below!
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
