This document discusses how Google is transitioning to a mobile-first indexing approach. It provides background on how search engines work and how they currently handle mobile versus desktop experiences. It outlines the key scenarios sites may face - responsive design, separate mobile and desktop sites, or no mobile site. The document encourages ensuring content is accessible on mobile, proper use of tags like canonical and alternate, and checking crawls to identify any issues. It provides examples of analyzing mobile versus desktop rankings and crawl data to measure impact.

1. @RyanJones
Mobile: First, Fast, and F*@King AMP
MOBILE FIRST:
What is it?
Am I Ready?

2. @RyanJones
VISUALIZING
SEARCH
ANALYSISRYAN JONES
Sr. Manager SEO @ SapientRazorfish
CEO – WTFSEO.com
@RyanJones
Linkedin.com/in/jonesy
www.RyanMJones.com
Yeah I’m that guy.

3. @RyanJones
How We Search Is Changing

4. @RyanJones
THERE ARE NOW
MORE MOBILE
SEARCHES THAN
DESKTOP
SEARCHES
Source:Google & Hitwise

5. @RyanJones
Why We Search Doesn’t Change
Stop trying to give
me words on a page.
Give me a solution.
Help me accomplish
something.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

6. @RyanJones
Reasons For The Change
Mobile Search Experience Sucks.
1. Click SERP Result
2. Get popup for app
3. Taken to app store
4. Back to browser
5. Close survey popup
6. Taken to mobile home page
7. Can’t find the content you clicked.

7. @RyanJones
Crawling
• Discovery
• Finding Pages
Indexing
• Like a book. List of words on pages.
• Paragraph vectors, B+ trees, nofollow, canonical, etc.
Retrieval (relevance)
• How relevant is this to my query?
• Query Understanding, entities (is jaguar an animal or a car?)
Ranking (Post Retrieval)
• Order by pagerank desc limit 10
• Penalties, Speed, HTTPS, Mobile Friendly, etc.
How A
Search
Engine
Works
Note: Google
doesn’t separate
these. This is for
illustration

8. @RyanJones 7
Indexing
What the crawler sees.
Content on the page.
Crawlable links
Markup
Disavow/robots/etc
Mobile Friendly
Viewport
Font sizes
Content scale
Links/Buttons clickable
No overlays / popups
Redirect/canonical/alternate
Mobile Indexing Vs Mobile Friendly

9. @RyanJones
How Google
Currently
Handles Mobile
Google Index
query
Desktop Results Ranked Based on Mobile Signals
Content that only exists on
desktop shown to mobile
users. Bad experience

10. @RyanJones
What’s
Changing?
Google Index
query
Mobile Index Results (with Desktop signals?)
Spam signals and rel canonical stuff

11. @RyanJones
Three Major Scenarios
1. Responsive site
2. Separate Mobile & Desktop
Sites (This includes AMP)
3. No Mobile Site At All

12. @RyanJones
No Mobile Site? No (big) Problem
Google crawler will still see your desktop site and index that.
Site won’t get “mobile friendly” ranking benefit but will still be
part of the mobile first index.
TODO: Make a responsive site

13. @RyanJones
Responsive
Content formatted to fit
the device.
Mobile and desktop see
same content.
Google’s preferred
method. You’re all set
for mobile first.

14. @RyanJones
Separate Mobile & Desktop Sites
1. Not ideal configuration any more.
2. Does content exist on both sites?
3. Are your canonical & rel=alternate tags working?
4. Does the mobile version have schema.org?
5. Is there a crawlable path to all pages from the mobile site?
6. Are the sitemaps updated and proper?
7. AMP is technically a separate mobile site.

15. @RyanJones
What About AMP?
Amp is awesome – but also kind of a pain in the ass.
But you should still look into it. It’s evolving
rapidly.
Best Practice: use rel=alternate and rel=canonical
between your desktop and AMP site just like you would
a regular mobile site. Don’t forget Schema.org markup.

16. @RyanJones
DO’s &DON’T’s
1. DON’T change your rel=alternate and canonicals
2. DO make a responsive site if you can.
3. DO get rid of those device type redirects from sub pages to
the mobile homepage. (Or create a mobile version of that
page)
4. DO add microformats (Schema) to your mobile site.
5. DO think about AMP.

17. @RyanJones
ENOUGH THEORY. HOW CAN I MEASURE MY IMPACT
OK… Enough
Theory.
Get To The
Examples…..

18. @RyanJones
The Boring But Effective Way: Excel and Search Console
Method One:
Search Console & Excel
Compare rankings on mobile and
desktop by page and keyword. If
you’re not ranking on mobile but
are on desktop – find out why.

19. @RyanJones
It’s easier to visualize using Fusion Tables. Here’s AMPProject.org
Data Source: SEMRush

20. @RyanJones
Here’s a site we just converted to responsive. Some content still missing from mobile.
Data Source: GoogleWebmaster Console

21. @RyanJones
We can do this with URLs too. Here’s my bank.
Data Source: Screaming Frog

22. @RyanJones
Because Picking On United is On Trend….
URLS Are a Better
Metric:
Compare
Screaming Frog
Crawls
Desktop Crawl Mobile User Agent
1011 Pages 69 Pages
Data Source: Screaming Frog Crawl with Different UserAgents

23. @RyanJones
Final Takeaways
1. If the mobile crawler can’t see it, you’re not going to rank for it.
2. ”Mobile Friendly” and Mobile Indexing are DIFFERENT.
3. Don’t forget your schema, hreflang, canonicals, etc. AMP if
you can.
4. Crawl your sites. Check WMT. Find the issues now.

24. @RyanJones
THANK YOU!
@RyanJones
Linkedin.com/in/jonesy
Owdy.co/ryanjones
RyanMJones.com
WTFSEO.COM