• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 1, 2023

Google announced the completion of its seven-year mobile project, but also said it's aware of "a very small set" of publisher sites that do not work on mobile devices.

The error message that serves up on the web page to all users indicates the mobile version of the site is blocked, while the desktop version is open to be crawled. Sometimes all pages on the mobile site redirect to the homepage.

John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google; and Nir Kalush, who works on the Search Console at Google, acknowledged in a blog post that for some reason Google cannot solve these issues, but engineers will continue to work on them. Google also will crawl these sites with its legacy desktop Googlebot crawler, re-evaluating the list a few times a year.

The company acknowledged the challenge in a blog posted Tuesday explaining the completion of its mobile-first indexing initiative.

It's been a long road, the company wrote, but Google’s mobile-first indexing initiative that began seven years ago is now complete, the company said Tuesday. 

Google Search started focusing more on mobile devices beginning in 2015. The company called it the mobile friendly update. Then, in 2016, It worked on the mobile first crawling and indexing that allowed Google Search to index the content that users would see, when they access the website on their mobile phone. By 2020, the switch to a mobile-first indexing mentality began.

Crawling and indexing as a smartphone was a big change for the infrastructure, but also a change for the public web. The work paid off with the ability to better read content on a mobile phone compared with a computer, laptop or tablet. It would not help not only those who frequented sites on their mobile phone, but also publishers looking to connect with readers on the go. 

Google said it also will turn off the indexing crawler information in the settings page in Search Console. This information is no longer needed since all websites that work on mobile devices are being primarily crawled with its mobile crawler.

Marketers can view the crawl stats report to see how any site is being crawled.