A practical checklist for mobile-first indexing

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Run through this the next time mobile-first indexing comes up.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The checklist

• The mobile version of your page is the one that gets indexed
• Content hidden on mobile carries less weight
• Parity between mobile and desktop content matters
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

The mobile version of your page is the one that gets indexed. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about mobile-first indexing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Content hidden on mobile carries less weight — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.