Google goes mobile-first on fresh domain names

Googlebot will index the mobile version on fresh sites.

Image of someone holding a phone with a mobile website

Registering a fresh domain name to launch a website? Make sure the content works well on mobile devices.

Google disclosed today that any fresh sites/domain names it indexes will be on a mobile-first basis. This means its Googlebot will crawl a mobile version of the site for indexing rather than a desktop version.

The search giant by now does this for many websites, but for existing websites, it determines if they are ready for mobile first ahead of using the mobile Googlebot. Not so with fresh websites; they must be ready to go out of the gate.

Of course, almost all fresh websites are mobile friendly and this is why Google is making the change.

In a blog post regarding the change, it noted that it still supports dynamic serving and mobile URLs but it advises against it. Instead, site owners ought to use responsive design. (Can we just get rid of .mobi by now?)

I find Google’s desire for fully responsive sites to be somewhat in conflict with its AMP program, which uses separate URLs for fast-loading mobile pages.

Also on the wire