Google has started sending emails to notify webmasters that their site has been migrated to mobile-first indexing.
The company announced last month that it would be sending notifications regarding mobile-first indexing, but today marks the first time anyone has actually seen them.
However, that doesn’t mean mobile-first indexing is just starting now. Google has confirmed that migration to mobile-first indexing began months ago.
Here is a look at the notifications Google is sending to webmasters who have verified ownership of their site with Google Search Console.
In case you cannot see the image above, here is what it says:
”Mobile-first indexing enabled for <URL>
To owner of <URL>
This means that you may see more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You may also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.
Background: Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they’re looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site’s content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.”
Google has previously mentioned that sites migrated to mobile-first indexing will see an increase in activity from the Googlebot Smarphone crawler.
