Useful Notes Regarding Google’s Mobile-First Search Index

Monday, March 26, 2018 Google in their webmaster central blog announced that they are rolling out mobile-first indexing. There are couple points I shared in the video and here are the link of those points if you want to take a look.

Googlebot User Agent for Smartphone

Read this instruction as well to identify the Googlebot web crawler presence in your server. Also, see this tweet by John Mueller where he mentioned a PHP script to find out the correct Googlebot

Curious which Googlebot is indexing a page – mobile-indexed or desktop? Try out this awesome PHP script from @jonoalderson , and double-check the cached page in search from time to time. https://t.co/RMnNAvRMKV

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) March 20, 2018

 

Eric Bidelman’s Tweet

On Feb 28th, 2018 Eric Bidelman (a Google Chrome Engineer) tweeted that Google search crawler is based on Chrome version 41 and it doesn’t support CSS custom properties.

PSA: Google Search crawler 🤖 is based on Chrome 41 [1], which does NOT support CSS Custom Properties [2]. If your layout/design relies on vars, make sure you’re compiling CSS so your page renders properly. I wasn’t 😢

[1]: https://t.co/ZinziTp4oT
[2]: https://t.co/PtAAR4ZOHq* pic.twitter.com/w4AhujZYSQ

— Eric Bidelman (@ebidel) February 28, 2018

Another Chrome engineer Domenic Denicola replied which makes total sense. See the other replies as well including this one from Tomek Rudzki.

Seems strange it would be making UX judgments based on a multi-year old browser engine that doesn’t reflect any actual users. (The “U” in “UX”.)

— Domenic Denicola (@domenic) March 1, 2018

And this is actually the first tweet where Ilya Grigorik (Web performance engineer at Google) first tweeted that Google search rendering is based on Chrome 41

Rendering on Google Search: https://t.co/bgacWwNyz8 – web rendering is based on Chrome 41; use feature detection, polyfills, and log errors! pic.twitter.com/pNptcvpjFo

— Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik) August 4, 2017

 

Chrome 41.0.2272.96 Features

Check out the following three links to get more sense on this specific version

a. Caniuse.com Chrome 41 Features (scroll down to see details)
b. Chrome 41 Web Rendering Service
c. Chromium Log
d. GDD India ’17 Video on JS and Chrome 41
e. Elephate.com Blog Post on Chrome 41

Also, yesterday ( March 28th, 2018) John Mueller did an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit. It’s vast but worth checking out the mobile first indexing questions and replies there.