If you have a long-standing website or your website isn’t designed with mobile-friendliness in mind, after July 5th, Google will no longer index your website on search results. 

What is indexing? Indexing is the process by which search engines list your website in their search results. This is done through the use of keywords and meta descriptions, allowing your site to be part of their search index.

So older websites and non-optimized mobile websites are going to be purged from search engines soon. This is part of Google’s Mobile-first index initiative. So, how do you know if your website is mobile-friendly?

• Google uses a tool called Googlebot to look at websites.
• In 2016, Google started using a mobile version of this tool called Googlebot Smartphone.
• By July 5, 2024, Google will only use the mobile tool to look at all websites.
• If a website doesn’t work on a phone or tablet, Google won’t include it in search results anymore.
• Most websites are already being looked at with the mobile tool, so this is just for the last few websites that aren’t yet.
• Some special cases, like job listings, will still use the desktop tool for now.
• If you need to make sure your website works on phones, you can use the Google Search Console to test it.

John Muller from Google explains on their blog:

“The largest part of the web is already being crawled like this, and there is no change in crawling for these sites.” However, “after July 5, 2024, we’ll crawl and index these sites with only Googlebot Smartphones.” He further explains: “If your site’s content is not accessible at all with a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable.”

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