Three myths about mobile-first indexing

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. A few things about mobile-first indexing that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

“It only matters for big sites”

The mobile version of your page is the one that gets indexed. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

“Our platform handles it”

Parity between mobile and desktop content matters. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

In practice

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
• Parity between mobile and desktop content matters — 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.