Your website is suitable for PC browsing and you rank well – but you never cared about the mobile browsing experience?
In concrete terms, you risk a lot:
In November 2016, Google announced that website indexing would become mobile-first. In other words, it is the mobile version of your site that will be analyzed to decide its positioning (it makes sense, since the majority of searches are carried out on mobile).
To help webmasters adapt their websites to mobile, and therefore to the Googlebot smartphone crawler, Google publishes a 6-step guide.
Content: Google advises webmasters to check their mobile sites for "important, high-quality" content.
Include: text, images (along with associated ALT attributes), and videos, in an accessible format for mobile users and the mobile Googlebot.
Returned data: These tags allowing Google to structure the data (articles, events, restaurants, products, films, books…) must be similar in the desktop and mobile versions of your site.
Meta data: same principle, Meta tags must be loaded on desktop and mobile and be similar in these two versions.
Canonical: If you are using two separate URLs for the mobile version and the desktop version, you must use the link rel="canonical" and link rel="alternate" elements to link the two versions.
International sites: You must adapt the link rel="hreflang" elements according to the version of the site crawled by the user (mobile or desktop, for websites that offer two distinct URLs).
Server: Finally, Google advises that crawling frequency may be higher than before (for sites that use separate URLs) and advises you to check your server capacity.
If your website is responsive and you don't hide important elements (see content section), you shouldn't encounter indexing problems.
Otherwise, it is advisable to follow the steps cited by Google step by step to avoid the risk of being penalized.
The search engine specifies that “[the] transition to mobile-first indexing [will be made] when the time comes, when the sites [are] ready.
This process has already started for a few sites."
To test the mobile-friendly character of your website, you can use this evaluation tool, developed by Google: search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
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