How Mobile First Indexing Will Affect Link Graphs

This has happened to all of us- bring up a webpage on the mobile device only to realise that the feature that you were so accustomed to using on the desktop is not there on mobile anymore. While it is a struggle for consumers, it is also hard for web designers and developers to simplify and condense the site on mobile screens without stripping the website of its original features. Seo company bangalore says that the worst case scenario is that for these trade offs some features would be reserved for desktop only with the provision for the user to opt out of the mobile version. 

With Google’s announcement that it will proceed with a mobile first index raises questions about how the structure of linking on the web would change as a whole.

Why is this a big deal?

The concern that stands is that mobile websites in order to improve user experience on the small screen often remove a lot of the content and links. This shortened content fundamentally alters the link structure which is one of the fundamentals of Google ranking.

Before we start, you should know that there is one unknown variable that affects Google is that one is not aware of how much of the web Google crawls with both the bots- mobile and desktop. It could be that Google will choose to be “mobile first” for those sites that display identical codebases to both mobile and desktop versions. There’s nothing better. 

Good link placements

External links that survived the cull of mobile version were very often placed directly in content. Essentially annihilated from the index, external links are not taken as very important in comparison with in-content links. This may be a signal that Google picks up on. External links that are both on mobile as well as desktop are the ones that tend to be the kind that people click on. So, although there may be fewer links that would power the link graph, if your links are good and content based, then you would have a chance to see improved performance. This can be seen by looking at the subset of good links. Sure enough, after testing a huge number of links, it is found that links are identical in the mobile and desktop crawls. These were good, in-content links and would thus show up in both versions of the crawl.

Selection bias

This is probably the case popular sites are way more likely to have a mobile version than a non-popular site. At the lower rungs, older and less professional content is very likely to have one one version that shows up on mobile and desktop devices alike. With a case like that you can expect that over time difference in the index might start to converge. Seo company Jaipur says that this is a bit speculative, but there is a possibility that there will be convergence between mobile and desktop index. 

There is a small chance that link graphs will grow exponentially different because the linked web is only so good. The paths to which certain pages are reached and the frequency with which it is reached is that it changes quite a lot.