When it comes to Mobile-First indexing, some webmasters wonder if Google has moved, or migrated, their site over to mobile-first.
Currently, it seems that Google Search Central holds a weekly session called SEO Office-Hours, which are a series of Q&A-style sessions.
Google Search Central usually announces these sessions either on their YouTube channel or their Twitter feed.
The most recent of these was the English Google SEO Office-Hours from December 10, 2021. It was hosted by, as usual, Search Advocate John Mueller.
So, back to our original topic. At the 2-minute, 9-second mark, a participant gave a brief description of his situation, accompanied by a question (the video is below the question, queued to the appropriate spot):
“So I’ve got a question. So I have this website I’m looking for, and we have this situation that this website hasn’t been migrated to mobile first indexing and there is a mixed state.
“We have some pages which have a separate mobile version and some other pages are responsive, and the link structure is kind of unclear. So I suspect that this might be the reason for the website not to be migrated to mobile first yet. And I just wanted to confirm if this is true or if there might be other reasons for that.”
To which, John Muller replied:
“I don’t know. My guess is maybe at the time where we were migrating all of the websites over, maybe that was causing it to be held back.
“But as far as I know, there’s still a batch of Mobile-First indexing sites that are just not migrated over. And it’s something where we’re working through some of the bigger sites there step-by-step to make sure that they can all be migrated cleanly.
“And then when we have the bigger issues resolved, then we’ll migrate the rest as well. So my guess is the website is in this holding position where it’s not necessarily that they’re doing anything wrong now, it’s just back when we checked it wasn’t perfect.”
To which the participant asked:
“OK, so you would say it’s good to just wait a little bit longer and to see what happens?”
To which John Mueller replied:
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know quite what the timeline is. But my guess is like towards the first half of next year we will be migrating all of the remaining sites over, and then you’d probably see that happen.”
So, when it comes to Mobile-First Indexing, currently (as of December 2021), not all sites have been migrated over.