Google Still Working On Moving Websites To Mobile First Indexing (MFI)

It looks like Google is working on moving websites to Mobile First Indexing (MFI) with no ETA in sight. Google search engineer John Mueller has said that the company is not done moving sites to its mobile-first indexing. The switch was first expected in September 2020, but then postponed until March 2021 earlier this year.

A recent tweet from John Mueller

“We’re still working on moving the remaining sites over to MFI. If you’re sure that things are set up well on your end, I wouldn’t try to “force” it — my assumption is we’re just not on the batch that includes your site at the moment. Also, MFI is not just MF, it’s the content.”

Other users have also noted that Google has moved forward with an affordable picks carousel to help locate products matches for a lower price. We have not had success in recreating this on mobile or desktop but we did notice the “Review for cheap products” carousel is just below the “Popular products carousel”.

We know that this past weekend there have been unconfirmed updates to Google search rankings. It’s difficult to know if it continues the link spam update rollout or if it’s something new. Either way, there are multiple indications that an update has occurred with implications for how we rank in our searches. Authoritative sites are noticing both new and old pages dropping in and out of Google’s index over the last few days. It is curious how certain pages disappear and then return. Google has not confirmed any of these reports but you may want to be aware of them.

Twitter is also full of complaints about Google showing Header Tags for Search Snippets instead of titles. This includes H1’s and H2’s instead of the actual meta title tags from the page. We tried to replicate this but had no success. Not sure if this is an actual change or test by Google but something worth mentioning. The owners of these websites were not very happy with how the SERPs look when pulling the wrong info for the snippets.

Google is constantly updating its algorithm to deliver the best results for users. With all of these recent changes, it’s important to stay on top of what Google indexes and how your website will be affected in order to keep up with the competition. We hope this blog post has helped you understand more about why Google updates its search engine often and some ways that SEOs can leverage these updates effectively. Contact us if you want help implementing a strategy that works well with MFI or have a question about recent changes to your rankings within Google or the other major search engines.