Google's mobile-first indexing effort, which began in 2016, was thought to have been completed last October, but in reality it won't be fully completed until after July 5th.
- “A small number of sites that are crawled by desktop Googlebot will start being crawled by mobile Googlebot starting July 5, 2024,” Google's John Mueller wrote in a Google blog post.
Mueller explained:
- “Most of the web is already crawled this way, and there will be no change to crawling these sites,” but “starting July 5, 2024, we will crawl and index these sites only with Googlebot smartphones.”
So if your site cannot be accessed using a mobile device, Google will not index it and it will not rank.
Mobile accessibility is required for Google indexing. Yes, Mueller writes, “if a site's content is completely inaccessible on a mobile device, the site will not be indexable.”
This has been a long time coming. Google has finally drawn a clear line for sites that don't render on mobile.
This doesn’t mean that Google won’t index your site if it’s not mobile-friendly. What Google is saying is that if your site doesn’t render or load on a mobile device, Google won’t index it.
If you only have a desktop template, it's safe to assume that the desktop version will load on mobile devices.
Continue crawling the desktop. Google has stated that it sometimes uses the Googlebot Desktop crawler for product listings and Google for Jobs, which means you may still see Googlebot Desktop in your server logs and reporting tools.
Why we care. For most people, this probably won't be a problem, but if someone hires you to do SEO for their site and the site doesn't load on an Android phone or iPhone, it may not be crawled and indexed by Google after July 5th. Your goal should be to make sure your site is accessible on mobile devices and test it using the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to make sure it renders.