Mobile Indexing: Google's Gary Illyes and Stone Temple's Eric Enge Discuss

Google's Gary Illyes and Stone Temple's Eric Enge Discuss the Importance of Mobile Indexing at Stone Temple's Next10x in Boston, MA on April 5th, 2017. For more information, please visit https://www.stonetemple.com/next10x-conference/index.html
Some highlights from this interview:

Eric: Why would the quality suffer so much if you were to begin the mobile index today?

Gary: So with these launches, we aim for quality neutral change, which means that even if sites might flip in our search results, the general information satisfaction will not change. We assess this with raters. The problem with this change is that, as I said, some tokens are missing. Some content is missing on the mobile sites and, apparently, some important content as well. So sites will not show up at all for specific queries. The other problem is that links/page rank is still very important for us. It's one of the most important ranking signals that we have…and, people don't really link as much on the mobile web, so we will have discovery problems as well. We will discover pages slower if sites don't link to those pages.

Eric: Should publishers try to put more links in the mobile experience or...?

Gary: So, I do think that it makes sense to create at least content parity on the two sites. So, I would try to identify content that is not relevant to a mobile user. For example, if you have product pages, then if you have text that is repeated on every single page on your sites then, perhaps, you don't have to copy that over. But the product description, I wouldn't cut because it might contain stuff that the user will search for.

With links, I don't think that we would ever ask people to try to find the links that are not available on their mobile site. That would be kind of silly to do

I don't know what the next iteration will be. We are working with the team that is driving the mobile-first indexing and we want to make sure that it won't put too much strain on the publishers because that's not our goal.

Eric: Yup. And just to clarify I think what was happening to you is you might have somebody with 150 words of product description related information on a desktop site and then on the mobile site there might be 25 words, and when you were ranking for the desktop…but it wasn't there on the mobile page. And that's why you want to make sure you have parity with each other. And that's why you don't care so much about the information which is, boilerplate repeat information because you weren't going to rank the page for that anyway.

Gary: Well, sometimes we do but those are low scoring queries anyway. So, for example, if we absolutely don't have content for pink unicorn flowers, then we would just use the navigation items or other boilerplate from the page for ranking purposes. But in general, we do try to limit ourselves to the centerpiece. Whatever you have in the center in the main content area, that's way more valuable than whatever you have in the navigation or footer or in some remote place on your site.

Видео Mobile Indexing: Google's Gary Illyes and Stone Temple's Eric Enge Discuss канала Eric Enge