• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 28, 2019

All new websites that were previously unknown to Google Search will be indexed using the company’s mobile-first indexing method starting on July 1, the company announced Tuesday.

For new websites, this indexing feature will become enabled by default, so there are no plans for Google to notify webmasters.

Google suggests that website owners check for this indexing through the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. This will provide information on how the content was crawled and indexed.

Google will continue to support dynamic serving and separate mobile URLs for mobile websites, but the company says it recommends responsive web design for new websites, wrote John Mueller, developer advocate at Google Zurich.

“Because of issues and confusion we've seen from separate mobile URLs over the years, both from search engines and users, we recommend using a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites,” he wrote.

Google’s analysis shows new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling. Rather than analyze the desktop version of the web page, Google now looks at the mobile version of the page before rendering it -- on a mobile phone and sometimes on desktop.

Older web sites that are not indexed using the mobile-first indexing method will be moved when those web sites are ready.

In December, Google announced that two years after it began working on its mobile-first indexing strategy, more than half of the pages served globally in search results are done using its mobile-first indexing.