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Google to Roll Out Separate Mobile Search Index

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A cell phone, a magnifying glass, and a computer monitor designed by Global Reach, an innovator in graphic design in Ames, Des Moines, and Iowa.

Posted on 11/07/2016 at 12:00 AM

Brace yourselves. Perhaps one of the biggest updates in the history of Google is about to rock search results, and it’s going to happen sooner than you might think. Google has announced that they will soon be dividing their search results pages in two. That’s right; there will be two sets of results, each one completely distinct from the other. One index will exist for mobile search, and one for desktop.

The announcement was made at Pubcon, a well-known social media and search engine optimization conference, by Google’s own, Gary Illyes. Buzz regarding the idea has been floating around since last year, and although it had not been officially confirmed until recently, Google is actually almost ready to launch the new separate search indexes.

After this change is rolled out, the search engine giant will begin to consider their mobile results pages to be their primary search index, meaning these results will be kept up-to-date with new information. The desktop index, on the other hand, will not be updated as frequently.

Because Google plans to maintain a more up-to-date mobile index, this means mobile users will get better results, more quickly as compared to desktop users. Over the last few years, Google has been demonstrating a heavy effort to enhance the mobile search experience – introducing the mobile algorithm update back in 2015, as well as their strong bias toward news content using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). With this latest news, it seems the inclination toward mobile will only be made stronger.

For those who have yet to implement a mobile-friendly website, this might be the nail in the coffin, as this update is arguably the most aggressive move Google has made in an effort to better serve the mobile majority.

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