09-11-2019
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Join Date: Sep 2000
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Update:
After sleeping on this change by Google (which we cannot reverse or control), and looking at Google Analysis as well as Google Search Console, I am not going to make any immediate code changes because all the stats show traffic continue to rise month-over-month (since April 2019). Our index of links with Google continues to grow, month over month.
So, I think better not to make any major changes based on the Google change to "Your site has been switched to Mobile First Indexing" and monitor the situation week by week.
I also checked to see if there is any "much better" responsive forum software (that works great on both mobile and desktop) to port our DB over to; for example the latest version of vBulletin, Xenforo, etc. But after a quick look, I did not see any compelling reason to do this; because the issue with Google seems to be with forums in general.
If there was any modern, very good, forum software which looked great (mobile and desktop), was well supported and had the tools to port our legacy vB database over to the new forum, I would consider this; but I do not think there are any good options out there.
So, I better not make any major knee-jerk reactions (code changes) to something Google has done which I don't really understand well.
If anyone has more information or suggestions, based on knowledge of what Google is doing here, please reply.