Google has begun sending out emails to inform webmasters that their sites have been transitioned to mobile-first indexing. Last month, the company announced it would be issuing notifications about mobile-first indexing, but today is the first time these notifications have been observed.
This does not imply that mobile-first indexing is only beginning now. Google has confirmed that the transition to mobile-first indexing started several months ago.
Here’s a glimpse of the notifications being sent to webmasters who have verified their site ownership with Google Search Console.
In case the image is not visible, here is the content of the notification:
“Mobile-first indexing enabled for your site.
To the owner of the site:
This means you may notice more traffic in your logs from Googlebot Smartphone. You might also see that snippets in Google Search results are now generated from the mobile version of your content.
Background: Mobile-first indexing signifies that Googlebot will now utilize the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking to better aid our (primarily mobile) users in finding what they’re searching for. Historically, Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have used the desktop version of site content, which can pose issues for mobile searchers when differences exist between the desktop and mobile versions. Our analysis shows that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.”
Google has previously stated that sites transitioned to mobile-first indexing will experience increased activity from the Googlebot Smartphone crawler.
