Last week we reported that Googlebot would largely stop crawling and indexing websites using its desktop crawler and would only crawl using its smartphone crawler (which caused a lot of confusion), but Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that this doesn't mean that “you can completely ignore what's served on desktop from an SEO perspective.”
John was asked, “Can I ignore the desktop version of my website because of mobile-first indexing?”
“Overall, I don't think you can completely ignore what's offered on desktop from an SEO and related standpoint,” John said.
He added: “If the only reason for having a site is Google SEO, then you'll probably choose mobile, but that's a human decision. Sites don't exist in a vacuum, and businesses do more than Google SEO.”
He again suggested “making it responsive” when making it mobile friendly.
Here is what he wrote in full:
First of all, not making a responsive site in this day and age seems strange to me. I understand that some sites haven't been updated for a long time and may require some maintenance for a while, but if you're making a new site,…
anyway.
With mobile indexing, it is true that Google focuses on the mobile version of web search indexing. However, there are other search engines and crawlers/requesters, and there are other requests that use desktop user agents (I mentioned some in a recent blog post, but there are also non-search user agents on the user agent documentation page). Overall, I don't think you can completely ignore what's offered on desktop from an SEO and relevance perspective. If you had to choose one, and the only reason you have a site is for Google SEO, you'd probably choose mobile now, but this is an artificial decision, your site doesn't exist in such a vacuum, and your business does more than Google SEO (and honestly, I hope you do, a good mix of traffic sources gives you peace of mind). And if you don't want to make this decision, go responsive.
So don't neglect what's in the desktop version, make it responsive and you won't have to worry too much about it.
Here's a screenshot of that discussion on Reddit, in case someone deleted it.
Discussion on Reddit forum.