Google has made an official announcement regarding roll-out of mobile-first indexing. This is the first acknowledgment they have made through their own channels. Google’s representatives had earlier stated that many websites had already migrated to mobile-first indexing.

Google has once again stated that it is only migrating those individual sites which follow the best practices prescribed for mobile-first indexing. Sites which use dynamic or responsive web design are most suitable for mobile-first indexing. When websites have AMP as well as non-AMP versions of content, Google will give precedence to mobile versions of non-AMP page.

As a response to Amazon, Google’s new umbrella program will widen existing relationships with retails. It will also enable comprehensive checkout across platforms and devices. Google has been focusing on retail challenges for some time. The major issues are:-

1. How to make mobile shopping through its properties like Search quicker?
2. How to maintain market share for product search in a breaking mobile landscape of digital assistants and applications?
3. How to compete with Amazon, the major threat to product search coming from Google.

All these factors relate to how to make more money from product searches.

Recently, Google announced a new effort known as Shopping Actions which builds on existing programs and pairs its product search, mobile shopping, inter-device transactions and voice search initiatives. The program indicates Google’s existing partnerships with Target and Walmart in order to support shopping through Google Express and Google Assistant. Google extends it to other retailers also.

Google has updated search results pages by adding breadcrumbs to the page’s top. These breadcrumbs are initiated by informational search queries and come with images. The new search display update is a unique step through which Google displays search results. This change is being considered as Google’s mobile first version which is evolving.

Redefining Google’s mobile first index

Google has been shifting to a mobile first index and this has been clearly understood that it will give precedence to sites which perform well in mobile devices. It is moving to new ways of displaying information which are suitable for mobile devices. The breadcrumb SERPs are considered a part of the transition to SERPs. There has been no official announcement regrading breadcrumb search results. The results have been displayed for searchers only.

Google has concetrated on getting website owners and markters to enhance mobile site experiences over the last couple of years. At the Mobile World Congress recently held in Barcelona, they announced the release of two new mobile benchmarking resources for assisting in the effort. They are a conversion Impact Calculator and a new Mobile Scoreboard.

Both these tools aim to offer marketers clear visuals to assist them to get buy-in from stakeholders for investing in mobile site speed. The Mobile Scorecard tracks data of Chrome User Exoperience for comparing speed of numerous sites on mobile. This is the same database of latency data from Chrome users which Google strated to use in its PageSpeed Insights Tool since January. Google has stated that Mobile Scoreboard can report on numerous websites from 12 countries.

Google has rolled out a new design for the Keyword Planner tool. This tool seems to be migrating to the new interface of Google AdWords. The tool looks more presentable and now matches the new AdWords interface which was launched recently. The tool now has a streamlined design and will enable advertisers to take make the best use of updated features to look for new keyword ideas and acquire keyword statistics and forecasts for campaigns on search network.