Treat separate locations for mobile and desktop

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Last but not least, you need to know how to effectively manage mobile-first indexing when you have separate sites for mobile and desktop.

And while this is becoming less common than it once was, thanks to the growing popularity of responsive sites, there are still some that offer separate versions for mobile and desktop.

So how do you manage them to avoid falling into the mobile-first indexing trap?

Follow these key points:

Be sure to properly implement rel=canonical and rel=alternate elements between the mobile and desktop versions of your site.
Make sure that the robots.txt file on both versions doesn't block essential parts of your site from being crawled. In particular, make sure that your mobile version doesn't block crawlers.
Carefully check the implementation of rel=hreflang markup to ensure that desktop URLs reference desktop URLs and vice versa for mobile URLs.
Configure and verify both versions of your site in Google sweden telegram data Search Console to enable access to all of your data, warnings, and messages.
Make sure that your site's desktop pages have corresponding mobile pages. Sometimes, pages are omitted from a mobile version, and as a result, those pages don't appear in Google's index with mobile-first indexing.
That said, Google does not recommend setting up a site with separate URLs , as it becomes complicated to implement and maintain. A responsive site is recommended in 2020, but if that’s not possible for some reason, take the time to thoroughly review both versions to avoid any issues.

Mobile-first indexing is scary at first, especially for those who remember Mobilegeddon in 2015, but the reality is that if you're already serving a great mobile experience and have made sure to get the same content across desktop and mobile devices, you don't have to worry.

But mobile indexing is here to stay, and the more you can communicate about it with your designers, developers, and others on your team, the easier it is to address recommended best practices before they become a problem.