Google announced on Tuesday this week that starting from July 1, 2019 they will be enabling mobile-first indexing by default for all new websites. This means that mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for the websites yet not indexed by the search engine and that there won’t be any change in case of old websites as of now whether they are mobile first indexed or not.
“Over the years since announcing mobile-first indexing – Google’s crawling of the web using a smartphone Googlebot – our analysis has shown that new websites are generally ready for this method of crawling.” – Google
For older websites however, the search giant will be monitoring and evaluating the web pages to confirm their readiness for mobile first indexing.
There will be no change in the guidance by the search engine company on getting websites ready for mobile-first indexing:
“For existing websites we determine their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on parity of content (including text, images, videos, links), structured data, and other meta-data (for example, titles and descriptions, robots meta tags). We recommend double-checking these factors when a website is launched or significantly redesigned.” – Google
Though the search engine will still support dynamic serving and separate URLs for mobile websites, it ultimately recommends for a responsive web design for all new domains.
As per the report, Google will be sending Search Console notifications to the webmasters of the older websites once they are ready for mobile-first indexing.
Since, the mobile-first indexing is the default method of indexing for new websites after July 1 this year, Search Console notifications will not be sent to them like the older websites.
According to the report, the search engine company will be monitoring and evaluating this change meticulously.