We’re tracking Google’s Mobile-First Indexing, here’s how you can too
Google’s John Mueller gave a presentation at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Munich earlier this week and has revealed some interesting new details about Mobile-First Indexing.
For us SEO’s, we have some important new details that we can use to track when Google begins the transition for sites that we manage.
One of the new pieces of information was that site owners will receive a notification through Google Search Console (GSC) when indexing has changed to Mobile, along with an annotation within reports which I imagine will look something like this:
While this information is extremely useful, an idea has been provided by John (very unusual for Google to give away this sort of information) for how you can track the transfer yourself.
It involves using the adding the following code to your website. This is in PHP, but you can adjust for whatever server-side language your website/CMS is written in:
<! -- User-agent: <?php echo $_SERVER[“HTTP_USER_AGENT”]; ?> -->
The idea is that you can log the user agent, basically the fingerprint of the computer accessing your website, in the HTML source code of your website.
Then you can check Google’s cached page source code, cleverly showing you which Googlebot, desktop or mobile, hit your website!
What comes next?
Apparently a considerable amount of sites have already made the transfer over to Mobile-First Indexing, although there haven’t been any reports of SEO’s getting the notification through GSC just yet.
I image that we will start to receive these soon though, and it will be an inbox explosion like we saw when the new Google Search Console Beta interface rolled out:
Although instead of waiting for Google to decide when to tell you about the change, it’s worthwhile implementing this process to see first-hand for yourself.
We hope you found this guide useful, and we’ll keep you posted when our magic code has come into play – hopefully we can find out before Google tells us!
James Richardson
Co-Founder
James is Co-Founder of Optimising who’s worked with everyone from national retailers and franchise groups to fast-growing eCommerce brands. He’s as interested in how AI engines send traffic as he is in old-fashioned rankings, and spends a lot of time testing how brands show up across search.
He started out running sports fan sites and early eCommerce stores, picked up a few senior sales and marketing roles at ASX-listed companies, then decided to build the kind of SEO agency he actually wanted to work at. Outside work, James is usually being out-negotiated by his three daughters, hosting very serious pretend tea parties, or supervising yet another cubby house build in the lounge room.
