Google’s New Rich Results Tool for Testing Web Page Structured Data
Recently, Google has announced some official advice to get yourselves ready for the mobile-first search index. This transition is due to be released early this year in 2018.
Some of the mobile-first index has already been brought out and is slowly being implemented into individual sites that are ready for it. However we are not too sure what it is meant to be ‘’ready’’.
Do you have a website for your business and is it optimised correctly for Google to understand? If you are not sure or if it is not correctly optimised, then you may be losing business. Come and talk to one of the team at Voova Digital today for a no obligation chat.
Six Ways To Get Ready
At Google, Gary Illyes explained a few ways to ensure that a website is ready for the mobile-first indexing. Those that utilize responsive web designs and dynamic serving don’t have to make changes.
Further more, here’s Google’s official advice.
- On your site, you need to make sure that it displays the same key content on the mobile site as it does on your desktop. Images, text and videos will be easy to crawl on mobile.
- Metadata, like titles and descriptions, need to be present on both versions of the site.
- Structured data should be on the desktop and the mobile versions. There there are separate versions of desktop and mobile URLs, this should be updates to the mobile version on the mobile pages.
- Those sites which are using separate URLs on the mobile version can keep their link rel=canonical and link rel=alternate the same.
- The server hosting the site needs to have the capacity to handle the increase crawl rate from the Smartphone Googlebot
- Hreflang links on the separate mobile URLs will need to be checked, When you use the link rel=hreflang elements for internationalization, the link between mobile and desktop URLs will need to be seperate. The mobile URLs hreflang will need to point the other language or region version on the mobile URLs if using these too and link the desktop with the other desktop URLs using hreflang link elements.
Implementing These
The sites will be evaluated individually on whether the above criteria has been met or not. If the requirements are met then the site can be transitioned to the mobile-first index.
Google will be making a deliberate effort to not rush through the mobile-first indexing process and Google believes that making the process slow will allow more webmaster to prepare and provide a better overall experience for mobile search visitors.
There isn’t a timeline in place where this will be fully rolled out but Google have previously mentioned that it was trying to aim for this to be completed early 2018. However, this sounds like it could take longer.
Contact Voova Digital today if you would like to discuss options regarding your company website. Whether you are looking for an update or ways to enhance and optimise.
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