Last week we reported that Googlebot will virtually stop crawling and indexing websites with its desktop crawler and will only crawl with its smartphone crawler (which caused a lot of confusion). But Google’s John Mueller continued Reddit who doesn’t think this means you can “completely ignore what’s served on the desktop in terms of SEO.”
John was asked, “Can I ignore the desktop version of a website for mobile-first indexing?”
John said: “Overall, I don’t think you can completely ignore what’s served on the desktop in terms of SEO and related.”
He added that if “you had to choose one and the only reason you’re running the site is for Google SEO, I’d probably choose mobile now, but it’s an artificial decision, sites don’t live in isolation like that, the businesses. do more than just Google SEO.”
He again suggested that you “be sensitive” when using mobile devices.
Here is the full text of what he wrote:
First of all, not making a responsive site in this day and age seems odd to me. I realize that sometimes things haven’t been updated in a long time and you might have to keep them for a while, but if you’re making a new site,…
Anyways.
With mobile indexing, it is true that Google focuses on the mobile version of web search indexing. However, there are other search engines and crawlers/requesters, and there are other requests that use a desktop user agent (I mentioned some of these in the recent blog post, there are also the ‘user that are not searchable in the user agent documentation. page). All in all, I don’t think you can completely ignore what is served on the desktop in terms of SEO and related. If you had to choose one and the only reason you’re running the site is for Google SEO, I’d probably choose mobile now, but that’s an artificial decision, sites don’t live in isolation like that, businesses do more than just Google SEO (and TBH I hope you do – a healthy mix of traffic sources is good for peace of mind). And also, if you don’t want to have to make that decision: answer.
So you might not be ignorant of what’s in your desktop version, and being responsive will help you not have to worry too much about it.
Here’s a screenshot of that discussion on Reddit, in case someone deletes it:
Discussion forum a Reddit.
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