Mobile Pages
With importance being placed on mobile-first indexing in search engines, ensuring a website is mobile-friendly and provides a positive experience is essential. Our SEO Office Hours notes below compile key insights from Google Search Central around mobile-friendliness, along with best practice guidance to ensure your website is set up for mobile success.
For more about mobile websites & SEO, check out our additional resources:
Resource Loading Errors Within Mobile Friendly Test and GSC Don’t Reflect Indexing Errors
Within the Mobile Friendly Test and Inspect URL Tool, Google fetches all of the page content and embedded URLs including images, fonts and JavaScript, which can sometimes cause timeout issues. However, this shouldn’t affect the indexing of the content for search results due to caching and the use of older versions of files.
Ensure Google is Able to Crawl All Resources Required for Mobile Friendliness
When testing sites for mobile friendliness, Google needs to render the page and will be unable to confirm if it is mobile friendly if it cannot access all of the content and resources required. The Mobile Friendly Testing tool can be used to check if there are any resources required for mobile friendliness that are blocked e.g. CSS or JavaScript.
Content Hidden in Tabs on Mobile Sites Will Not Appear in Featured Snippets
Content which is contained behind a tab on a mobile site will not appear within featured snippets in search results, this is due to Google only wanting to show something in a snippet if they can be sure the user will be able to easily find the content when they visit the page.
Mobile-first Indexing Rolled Out to Over 50% of Websites
Google has switched over to mobile-first indexing for over 50% of websites and the team is on track with regards to rolling this out to the remainder of websites.