Google Search to rank sites by their mobile versions

San Francisco: Google has announced that starting July 1, all new websites would be analysed and ranked on Search on the basis of "mobile-first indexing".

"Mobile-first indexing" means Google would consider the mobile version of any new website for evaluating, indexing and ranking the site, instead of the desktop version which was used primarily. 

"We're happy to announce that 'mobile-first indexing' will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search websites, starting July 1, 2019," John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Google, wrote in a blog-post on Tuesday. 

For older and existing websites, Google would determine their readiness for "mobile-first indexing" based on the parity of content including text, images, videos, links and structured data as well as other meta-data-like titles and descriptions. 

"We will notify them through Search Console once they're seen as being ready. Since the default state for new websites will be 'mobile-first indexing', there's no need to send a notification," Mueller said. 

Google said it is pleased to see that "mobile-first indexing" has come a long way.

"We're happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents," Muller said.