The mobile first index is slowly spreading its arms and has been rolling out from the past few days. We have also published a related post in “Has the Google started Mobile-First Indexing?”
It was really shocking to hear when I learned that Google will ignore your AMP pages by default and instead use the desktop version of your page in the mobile first index. Point to note is that it will ignore the AMP version even if you do not have an alternative mobile friendly option other than the desktop version of the page.
Have an AMP version but not mobile version?
Let’s take a situation when you solely have a desktop version of your site and do not possess any mobile version. You decide to skip the efforts and directly go to the AMP development of your pages. In that case, though the AMP version is friendly like hell with mobile devices, it won;t be used by default in mobile first-index. It seems like Google wants you to have a desktop site, a mobile site, and an AMP version of the pages. Because none of the versions are unimportant and all of them have their uses in different scenarios, so you can’t afford to skip any of them already.
What Google has to say about it?
When Google explained the above case, they said, they will skip the AMP version by default in their mobile first index; instead, they will choose the desktop version to verify the ranking signals in the mobile first index.
However, if you are really into your AMP pages and think they have some better alternative attributes, then you can force Google to use AMP in the mobile first index, but it will require a serious modification to serve both as mobile version alternative plus the AMP itself. Though it seems, not so realistic that a site will have an AMP but not the mobile version. So, some serious assumption has been made by Google, and hopefully, they are not wrong.
It might make some sense
Though there isn’t any official explanation for this, it might be possible that the lack of real site navigation on AMP pages makes it difficult for Google to crawl the website. That is why they have skipped it by default.
Final thoughts
The new feature is still in testing phase and Google is coming with some shocking news day after day. It’s wise that you coordinate with your SEO company and develop some genuine alternatives to the AMP pages so that you won’t be bothered with the new mobile first index when it is finally rolled out. If you have not made your site mobile friendly yet, it’s still the time and you can achieve a lot in your SEO before the mobile first index hit the floor. Keep tuned for latest updates on the mobile first index.
