Your site has been switched to Mobile First Indexing


 
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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Your site has been switched to Mobile First Indexing
# 1  
Old 09-10-2019
Your site has been switched to Mobile First Indexing

Well, Google throws the web a curve ball again:

Quote:
Your site has been switched to Mobile First Indexing
The majority of Google's crawl requests to your site will be made using a mobile crawler.

Switch date: September 1, 2019

LEARN MORE
I thought I was going to get a break from coding; but no.....

Image
# 2  
Old 09-11-2019
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.
These 3 Users Gave Thanks to Neo For This Post:
# 3  
Old 09-11-2019
Google likes, if pages are W3C and WCAG compliant.

Few links may be useful.

Make your site more accessible - Sites Help

Web Accessibility Checker
IDI Web Accessibility Checker : Web Accessibility Checker

W3C validator
The W3C Markup Validation Service

Probably if we use PageSpeed Modules many markup can be corrected, also can reduce few http requests, if you enable http2 (major modern browsers supports) protocol then we may gain little improvements in performance ( no need to minify resources, multiplexing takes care )

HTTP/2: the difference between HTTP/1.1, benefits and how to use it
This User Gave Thanks to Akshay Hegde For This Post:
# 4  
Old 09-11-2019
Hi Akshay,

All of those things you listed, we did in 2018 and before with the exception of mod_pagespeed, for Apache2, which broke the site the last time I tried to implement it.

However, I admit that we need to spend more time optimizing the mobile HTML since most of the optimization has been on the desktop.

But the issue is really "why"? Because Google Analytics shows that a full 94% of our site traffic is from desktop browsers and only 4% is from mobile browsers, so it seems a bit "nutty" for Google to automatically switch our indexing to "Mobile First Indexing" when mobile accounts for only around 4% of all traffic.

I will try to enable mod_pagespeed again this weekend when the traffic is low and see what happens.

OBTW, here is a list of the current modules enabled:

Code:
server:/var/www/includes# cd /etc/apache2/mods*en*
server::/etc/apache2/mods-enabled# ls -l
total 4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  36 Sep  5  2018 access_compat.load -> ../mods-available/access_compat.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  28 Sep  5  2018 alias.conf -> ../mods-available/alias.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  28 Sep  5  2018 alias.load -> ../mods-available/alias.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  33 Sep  5  2018 auth_basic.load -> ../mods-available/auth_basic.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  33 Sep  5  2018 authn_core.load -> ../mods-available/authn_core.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  33 Sep  5  2018 authn_file.load -> ../mods-available/authn_file.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  33 Sep  5  2018 authz_core.load -> ../mods-available/authz_core.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  33 Sep  5  2018 authz_host.load -> ../mods-available/authz_host.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  33 Sep  5  2018 authz_user.load -> ../mods-available/authz_user.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  32 Sep  5  2018 autoindex.conf -> ../mods-available/autoindex.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  32 Sep  5  2018 autoindex.load -> ../mods-available/autoindex.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  30 Sep  5  2018 deflate.conf -> ../mods-available/deflate.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  30 Sep  5  2018 deflate.load -> ../mods-available/deflate.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  26 Sep  5  2018 dir.conf -> ../mods-available/dir.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  26 Sep  5  2018 dir.load -> ../mods-available/dir.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  26 Sep  5  2018 env.load -> ../mods-available/env.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  29 Sep  5  2018 filter.load -> ../mods-available/filter.load
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 133 Dec 28  2018 geoip.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  28 Sep  5  2018 geoip.load -> ../mods-available/geoip.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  30 Feb 22  2019 headers.load -> ../mods-available/headers.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  27 Sep  5  2018 mime.conf -> ../mods-available/mime.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  27 Sep  5  2018 mime.load -> ../mods-available/mime.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  34 Sep  5  2018 mpm_prefork.conf -> ../mods-available/mpm_prefork.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  34 Sep  5  2018 mpm_prefork.load -> ../mods-available/mpm_prefork.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  34 Sep  5  2018 negotiation.conf -> ../mods-available/negotiation.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  34 Sep  5  2018 negotiation.load -> ../mods-available/negotiation.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  29 May  3 21:55 php5.6.conf -> ../mods-available/php5.6.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  29 May  3 21:55 php5.6.load -> ../mods-available/php5.6.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  33 Sep  5  2018 reqtimeout.conf -> ../mods-available/reqtimeout.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  33 Sep  5  2018 reqtimeout.load -> ../mods-available/reqtimeout.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  30 Sep  6  2018 rewrite.load -> ../mods-available/rewrite.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  31 Sep  5  2018 setenvif.conf -> ../mods-available/setenvif.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  31 Sep  5  2018 setenvif.load -> ../mods-available/setenvif.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  36 Sep  6  2018 socache_shmcb.load -> ../mods-available/socache_shmcb.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  26 Sep  6  2018 ssl.conf -> ../mods-available/ssl.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  26 Sep  6  2018 ssl.load -> ../mods-available/ssl.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  29 Sep  5  2018 status.conf -> ../mods-available/status.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  29 Sep  5  2018 status.load -> ../mods-available/status.load

# 5  
Old 09-11-2019
Also, it does look like I need to run the site though the WC3 HTML validator again as well.
# 6  
Old 09-11-2019
Quote:
Originally Posted by Neo
Also, it does look like I need to run the site though the WC3 HTML validator again as well.
OK. I think we are "more than OK" on WC3 HTML validator on the desktop (just fixed some pages).

But honestly, all of this had really nothing to do (that I can think of) with the title of this post:

"Your site has been switched to Mobile First Indexing"

and why a site like ours with over ninety percent all traffic from the web has been switched to Mobile First Indexing by Google; and what we should really do, if anything about it. I have already read the "google learn more" pages.
# 7  
Old 09-11-2019
Quote:
Originally Posted by Akshay Hegde
Google likes, if pages are W3C and WCAG compliant.

Few links may be useful.


W3C validator
The W3C Markup Validation Service
OK.... I ran the main pages though the validator and all looks fine ( .... ). Was some errors (most were warning before and are not listed as errors), so I fixed them (the errors, not the warnings).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Akshay Hegde
Probably if we use PageSpeed Modules many markup can be corrected, also can reduce few http requests, if you enable http2 (major modern browsers supports) protocol then we may gain little improvements in performance ( no need to minify resources, multiplexing takes care )
OK.... Done... mod_pagespeed is enabled and verified running.

The last time I checked, our main pages were all HTTP/2 compliant in 2018. Maybe I missed something.

If you see any non-compliant pages, please let me know.

Thanks Akshay!
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