#you’re one of the earliest blogs i remember seeing frequently in my notes

[a-little-unsteddie]

Happy 500! I am so happy for you 💗! For the prompt w37. famous au (i want you to go hogwild) but Argyle/Steve

the moment i saw this prompt i knew i had to fulfill it as soon as possible because!!!! permission to go hogwild!! thank you so much!! i hope you enjoy what i whipped up! (coughs this also may or may not have an alternative version that i started writing and abandoned because i thought it was too much but if you wanna see that version too i’ll finish it and post it, too!)

37. Famous AU (Steve/Argyle)

Prompts || AO3

Steve wasn’t obsessed, despite what Robin insisted. Steve just had a healthy interest, that was all. A director that simply went by ‘Argyle’ had directed so many of Steve’s favorite films, and when he had learned that the man was planning on hiring for a new film, Steve had jumped at the chance to audition. He had immediately called Robin and told her to submit his portfolio for the audition. Since then, Steve hadn’t stopped checking his emails, voice mails, DMs on various social sites, just in case he hadn’t seen the acceptance to move forward with the physical audition.

He’d also been stalking Argyle’s social media accounts just to see the goofy pictures he always posted.

Robin called him obsessed.

Honestly, even if Steve didn’t want to admit it, she was probably right. He couldn’t stop refreshing his instagram page, holding his breath for any sort of update from the director. Robin was trying to be a good manager and drag him out to some sort of party that some big wig was hosting, to make connections, but he just didn’t want to go out.

“What if Argyle’s people contact us while we’re out?” Steve asked, biting his thumbnail, looking wildly between Robin and his phone.

“Then they’ll leave a message and we can get it in the morning,” Robin said, throwing her hands in the air. Steve suddenly realized actually, maybe Robin was right, he was a little obsessed, huh? He took a deep breath, nodding.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Okay. I’ll go.” He said with another nod. Robin grinned, Steve squinted, “Why do you look so smug?”

“I do not,” Robin said, rolling her eyes. “Go change, something fancy but, like, feel free to be a whore.”

Steve let out a loud laugh at that, knowing that he had a bit of a reputation around the scene as someone who wore extravagant things. It was something he prided himself in. This time, Steve went with a sleeveless blue turtle neck that was made out of velvet, tight white jeans and a necklace made out of quartz beading. He enjoyed how the shirt showed off his broad shoulders.

“Are you finally done getting ready?” Robin asked, waiting for him by the bottom of the stairs as he exited his room.

“You can’t rush perfection, Robbie. Let’s go,” he said, brushing off imaginary lint from his shoulder. Robin rolled her eyes, walking towards the door with him where a sleek black car was waiting to take them to the party.

“Who’s even hosting the party?” Steve asked, sometime later as street lights passed them in a blur.

Robin hummed, suddenly looking nervous, “Uh, you’ll see!” She said, grinning at him. “Oh, look! We’re here!” She said, gesturing to the door that was currently being opened for them. Steve blinked, sure that they were just driving through the city moments ago. Shrugging, he stepped out, smiling at the flashing lights as he and Robin walked the short distance between the car and front door. The party had already been going for at least an hour, Steve knew, as Robin had spent most of the day trying to convince him to go and he had only agreed once the party was starting. It probably was fine that they were fashionably late.

The moment Steve entered the house, he suddenly knew exactly who was hosting the party. He leaned over to whisper into Robin’s ear.

“What the fuck?” He hissed, eyes darting around the semi-familiar decorating. Steve had seen it often enough on Argyle’s feed, or on a documentary that had been done on his directing style.

“Well! Someone had to make sure you didn’t panic about tonight!” Robin said, holding his elbow, smiling at some of the other celebrities that had made an appearance tonight.

Steve was cut off from responding when suddenly a loud, serene voice greeted them, “My dudes! You made it!” The voice said, to which Steve turned and came face-to-face with the man he had been lowkey obsessing over the last several weeks.

Steve forced a smile onto his face, hoping that it adequately hid the all-consuming panic that washed over him. “Of course, sorry we’re late,” Steve said, looking at the other man sheepishly. Argyle was wearing a bright outfit, something that he was normally seen in, so it wasn’t something that particularly surprised Steve to see.

“No worries, man,” Argyle said, smiling at Steve in a way that let him know that the director was definitely partaking in something. “Just glad you could make it, Stevie, can I call you Stevie?” He asked imploringly, looking completely at ease, which Steve found himself jealous of because it felt as though his heart was beating so hard it had to be visible—at least audible.

Steve felt his cheeks heating at the nickname, a shyer smile overtaking his features as he responded, “That’s fine,” he confirmed softly.

“Sweet,” Argyle said, pulling him into a hug, which caused Steve to freeze before wrapping his arms around the other man as well. He blinked rapidly as the man pulled back with a smile, “Let me show you around, Stevie,” he said, before leading them away from Robin, who didn’t follow. Steve swallowed thickly, feeling completely off-kilter, like his entire world just tilted on its’ axis.

Steve found himself being shown to a quieter part of the house, where there were fewer people around. It looked as though this was reserved for people close to Argyle, which Steve figured made sense, but he was confused as to why he was being invited to this inner-sanctum, where the likes of Jonathan Byers and Eden Bringham were lounging, as well as a few others that Steve recognized from Argyle’s instagram, but didn’t remember the names of.

“Stevie, this is Jonathan, Eden, Chrissy, and Eddie,” Argyle introduced, to which everyone looked over and smiled in greeting. “Everyone, this is Steve,” he said, and Steve thought it was odd that it was already alien to hear his ‘legal’ name falling from Argyle’s lips. Unknown to Steve, Argyle had purposely introduced him to them using his proper name to avoid the others from calling Steve ‘Stevie’, wanting the nickname all to himself.

After being introduced, Argyle led him to the far side of the room, to a loveseat that was already half taken up by Eden. Argyle sat and dragged Steve down onto his lap, which, while Steve definitely didn’t mind, found himself squirming in place anyway.

“It’s good to meet you, Steve,” Eden said, smiling in the same serene way that Argyle smiled, which was a little unnerving to see on her in a way that it wasn’t on Argyle.

“You, too,” Steve returned with a smile, always polite even if he was confused. He leaned closer to Argyle’s side, “What am I doin’ down here?” He asked quietly, looking at him with open confusion. “Not that I mind,” he added after a moment.

“Well,” Argyle said, smiling at him in a way that should’ve felt absent, but wasn’t, “Robin sent in your portfolio, and I liked what I saw, so I wanted to make sure we got along, Stevie. Think of this as the audition,” he explained, which didn’t shed light on why he was in Argyle’s lap, but did sort of explain why he was invited to the inner-sanctum. He had heard that Argyle’s auditions were a bit more casual than others, but he hadn’t expected this sort of casual.

“That makes sense,” Steve said, trying to settle in his new spot. Argyle helped him get comfortable, gripping his hips and adjusting him until he was sitting between Argyle and the end of the couch, with his legs thrown over Argyle’s lap while the other man had his arm around Steve’s shoulders.

From there, conversation picked up around them and soon enough it felt as though Steve was just hanging out with a couple of friends. Steve wasn’t sure how much time had passed before Argyle checked the clock and groaned.

“Aw, bummer, I gotta make an appearance upstairs,” Argyle announced, nudging Steve slightly to get off.

“I can join you,” he offered with an easy smile, “make it a little less unbearable?”

Argyle’s face brightened, “Perfect, Stevie. Let us go,” he said, offering his arm. Steve flushed, grabbing it.

They made their rounds, making small talk with a few of the guests, making sure that they were making appearances in a few different conversations. It was the most boring part of the night, but Steve didn’t mind. He didn’t particularly understand how he got there—hanging off the arm of Argyle, but he didn’t mind being the pretty thing on this particular arm. Eventually, they were able to escape, this time out to the balcony rather than the basement.

“Wow,” Steve breathed, taking in the view, “that’s gorgeous.” Argyle glanced at him and smiled.

“Almost as gorgeous as you, Stevie.”

Steve turned to him in surprise, feeling heat flood his cheeks. He smiled shyly, which Argyle easily returned with confidence.

“Thank you,” Steve breathed, turning to look back out at the view. He felt Argyle move to stand behind him, wrapping one arm around him and the other rest on the railing in front of them.

“What are the chances of a date, Stevie?” Argyle asked, with a confidence that Steve envied.

“With me?” Steve asked, needing to be sure. Argyle hummed affirmatively. “I’d say they’re pretty good,” he admitted softly, smiling as Argyle cheered in his ear.

“Then, will you go on a date with me, Stevie?”

“Absolutely.”

Steve was definitely obsessed.

[joaquinwhorres]

Parting Shot (Ch.1) {Clint x OC}

SUMMARY ››› It started as a simple task: stop a potentially homicidal alien and recover the work it stole from SHIELD. But when a local baker finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, Clint Barton may have more to protect than just a couple of pages.

PAIRING ››› Clint Barton x Female OC

WORD COUNT ››› 3,460

WARNINGS ››› I would say this whole story is T for Teen. So you’re pretty safe.

A/N ››› This isn’t typical Tumblr fare. It’s a multi-part series with an OC, but I’ve been perfecting this for 8 years so maybe give it a shot? Also, I released this on my side blog and honestly I just want to see which one gets more notes so I know where to release it. I’d prefer to just put it on there, but this story is too good to sleep on.

Near Cima, California

Agent Hill greeted Nick Fury as he climbed out of his helicopter.

"How much was lost on PIECES?" He didn't bother greeting her. One of the privileges of being the director of the world's central secret law-enforcement agency was that it was well within his rights to bypass the normal social formalities.

"He took the second half of the journal along with all of the translations," Hill informed. "All we have left is Dr. Selvig's memory." She eyed the manila folder in the director's hand as she fell into step with him, exiting the helicopter pad. His thumb covered the file name, only leaving the SHIELD logo exposed.

"And the agent providing the translations?" His voice commanded her attention back to him, and Agent Hill met his eyes briefly to deliver the news.

"Gone, sir."

Fury nodded once as if she affirmed his prediction. "Are there others?"

Hill shook her head as the pair descended further into the facility. "She's the only casualty so far, but at last check there are eleven agents in the MedFacility in varying conditions."

"What's Agent Barton's status?"

"Down in the lab helping Dr. Selvig assess the damage. He was one of the few to witness the Vanish and not have any scars to show for it."

"Anything else I should know about?" Fury probed, stopping before the lab's door.

"No, sir." Agent Hill shook her head.

"Good. Make sure someone notifies the deceased agent's family is notified. In person," Director Fury ordered. "And contact Agent Romanoff to debrief her on what's happened."

"Should we pull her from the field?" Agent Hill asked.

"That remains to be seen."

Hill nodded before taking off back the way they had come. Fury turned to the lab, pushing open the doors to see what was left of the Project.

Had he inspected the lab on a normal day, only the soft whirring sounds of machines would have greeted him into the streamlined, spacious room. Every object and agent would be in its place. And the agents would have been too absorbed in whatever research he or she was laboring over to notice the abnormally loud footsteps.

But today was not a normal day.

Agents dashed about, checking equipment, tinkering with equipment, dodging sparks flying off the equipment. Papers were scattered across the floor with agents scrambling to rescue them. The salvaged documents were passed quickly from agent to agent and delivered to different workstations around the room where others attempted to piece together and log what information they still had. Smoke hovered in the air around them, and towards the back of the room, someone set down a fire extinguisher to wipe his brow. In the midst of the chaos stood Dr. Selvig, shouting brief directives to each agent who scurried past him.

"How's it looking, Doctor?" Fury asked. The scientist whirled around to face the director, his hands full of photocopies. He was unusually pale and his hair was mussed. A small cut above his left eyebrow trickled blood.

"It's not good, Director; I can tell you that," he responded, guiding Fury to a table where Agent Barton hovered over a journal and several of its torn pages. "This is what we have left on the project," Selvig sighed as Agent Barton reordered the pages, shuffling two down to put another in its proper place. "He took Kendrick's journal and Kathryn's notebook with her translations. All of our electronic copies are lost since he fried the mainframe and corrupted our backup server. We're looking for any copies he might have missed, but it looks like it's all down to the few notes I've made along the way." Dr. Selvig looked around the room as if to fully survey the damage. "You know, it's getting dangerous working for you. You'd think I would have learned after Loki."

"Can you make any progress with what's here?" Nick Fury asked, ignoring the comment, or maybe failed joke. Dr. Selvig turned back to look at the director, watching as Fury turned a few of the pages around so he could get a better look at them.

"Very little. His theories are too progressive and without having the proper translations for the formulas…" Selvig trailed off, his attention captured by the chaos once more.

"And how long before you can retranslate?"

"We could start retranslation in a week at the earliest. We have to get all of this sorted and figure out exactly how far back this incident has put us. Once we have it all together, actually retranslating could take at least another three weeks, probably more without Kathryn." Dr. Selvig moved around to the other side of the table, his eyes darting between the papers before finally snatching one up and coming back over to Fury. "I've put together a list of the formulas and translations I remember, but it's not much to go on."

Fury took the list, setting it against his folder as Dr. Selvig peered over his shoulder, pointing to a name. "This, we discovered is connected to Dr. Wilhelm Alder. He's an expert on black holes—specifically their expansion and contraction. Actually," Dr. Selvig's eyes brightened with a moment of clarity. "He's giving a lecture this Saturday at the New York Hall of Science. There's a gala there—"

"What else is here?" Fury interrupted.

It took Dr. Selvig a second to collect himself before he returned to the list. "This," he pointed at the bottommost formula that was underlined and circled; from the formula, an arrow was drawn pointing at a name with a couple of question marks next to it. "Appeared the most often. It's not really apparent in the earlier work, but it became increasingly frequent throughout. We have no idea what Kendrick meant by this."

"I do," Fury commented, tearing off the last name before sliding the rest of the list inside of the manila folder. The gesture effectively ended the subject of names and translations.

"I was thinking, aside from seeking out Dr. Alder, perhaps it's time to call in Jane Foster or Dr. Banner. It's bad enough that we lost so much information, if we had them maybe—" Selvig swayed a little bit, and Fury furrowed his brow.

"Perhaps you should get that cut checked out Doctor," Fury suggested.

"It's fine, just a minor laceration. Anyway, as I was saying, Jane or—"

"I'm not bringing anybody else into Project PIECES. In fact, I'm taking you off of this as soon as you have everything sorted out," Fury said, flagging down an agent who was scurrying by.

"What?" Dr. Selvig sputtered. "For this little thing?" he gestured to his head.

"As you said, working here is getting dangerous for you. And the last thing I need is a repeat of the Chitauri Incident," Fury gave the scientist a significant look. Dr. Selvig nodded somewhat reluctantly. "Agent Heung, see Dr. Selvig to the MedFacility, and notify Agent Hill to begin preparations to move what we have to the Helicarrier." The agent nodded, wrapping an arm around Dr. Selvig's waist to escort him up to the MedFacility. The director watched them go for a minute before turning to the remaining agent. "Agent Barton?" For the first time since Director Fury entered the room, the agent looked up from the papers.

"Yes, sir?" Agent Barton asked coming alongside Fury as the director moved to leave the room.

"What's happened here?"

"The alien came through the door, and we immediately made an effort to restrain him. He released a device which emitted some kind of energy blast, knocking us backwards and temporarily paralyzing us. He made his way up to the journal, setting off more of these devices which did a number on the equipment and those around it including Dr. Selvig. Agent Blake managed to avoid the blasts and came at him with her gun, and he killed her. By that time the effect of the pulse had worn off, and we were able to surround him. I took my shot, but he just vanished." Agent Barton paused his report, as if unwilling to share the next bit. "Sir, if he was capable of causing this much destruction, he let us take him in. He wanted to be here so he could get to the journal. And now that he has those translations, I think he's going to start going after the people in Kendrick's journal."

"My thoughts exactly," Fury responded, handing the folder over to Agent Barton.

"Operation A.R.R.O.W." the agent read the cover of the folder. "Is this a joke?"

"The names on Selvig's list are going to need protection, and we need to know why Kendrick put these names in his journal," Fury ignored Clint's question. "Which starts with you going to the Meeting of Minds Gala this Saturday."

"Me, sir? I'm a soldier. Natasha would be better suited for this," Barton protested.

"Agent Romanoff is where I need her in the field. Besides, I need someone who will play well with Stark."

"Stark?" The disappointment seeped through his professionalism.

"Invitations are hard to come by, and he already has one. Yours is in the file along with everything else you need to know," Fury said, gesturing at the folder. The agent's forehead creased with a question that he knew better than to ask. "Be at Stark Tower by six," Nick Fury ordered before walking away, leaving the agent behind.

In Manhattan, New York City

Molly McKay rarely ate breakfast at home.

Food was never appealing at four in the morning, and since she had to be at Monarch Bakery by five to begin the day's baking, she was left with a choice: suffer through an early breakfast or push through to brunch. As with most people in her line of work, Molly respected food too much to simply eat for the sake of eating. So, Molly usually skipped breakfast, opting to break for brunch once Hilary came in to finish off the baking. If a 9:30 meal could even be called "brunch."

Regardless of labels, Molly often found herself walking down to Pershing Square Café on the days she worked to enjoy her first meal of the day there. Her actual enjoyment of it was a bit of a debatable subject, but to say so would be getting ahead of things. As it was, the food was good and the frequency of her visits along with the donation of pies to their bakery case afforded her a significant discount, so she continued to go more often than not.

The only significant thing to threaten her enjoyment came in the form of a young blonde waitress who decided that it was her goal in life to make Molly better. Beth. Somehow, Molly had been stuck at Beth's table a couple of times in a row, resulting in Beth's unshakable belief that they were now friend. Best friends, actually. The hostess, perhaps thinking she was doing Molly a favor, perhaps avoiding Beth's wrath, continued to seat Molly in Beth's section every day. And so, Molly started off every morning with Beth. Every morning. With Beth.

"Molly!" Beth exclaimed in her singsong voice, swooping over to the baker's table. "How are you?"

"I'm good," Molly responded calmly to the perky blonde, flipping to the next page of the menu. Molly had memorized the options a long time ago (one of the gifts of having a true photographic memory) so aside from checking the specials, perusing it was mainly for distraction value. A polite way to ignore Beth.

"Did you try the hair rinse I suggested? A little rosemary and apple cider vinegar will really bring the life back to your hair. Make it less…flat," Beth picked up strands of Molly's brunette hair with her free hand before letting them fall back into place.

"It's on the shopping list," Molly answered with a weak smile, resituating herself on the bench and subtly scooching a little further out of the waitress' reach.

Beth let out a dramatic gasp, and Molly's head jerked to the waitress, her eyes wide. The blonde's smile seemed to have grown. Which could only mean…"Did I tell you? O Captain! My Captain! Reached 1.5 million fans," Beth gushed, pouring Molly a cup of coffee.

"Really?" Molly asked, not bothering to put the usual tinge of interest in the tone. Instead, she reached to the small porcelain bowl at the center of the table and plucked out two creamers. Carefully, Molly peeled off the paper covering them before pouring them circularly into her coffee. She still had a good five minutes of Beht going on about Captain America and her great website – it was the leading fansite for Captain America in the world, did you know that? – and there was nothing Molly could do to stop her.

"To celebrate I reposted the story of how he saved my life," Beth said, her voice turning dreamy at the end of her sentence. Molly stacked the empty creamers together and reached for the sugar display. "It was the day of the Chitauri Invasion—" The baker had heard this story so many times that she could probably recite it in unison with Beth. I was being herded across the street along with everyone else by the police. There were gunshots and explosions all around. It was as if my life had suddenly turned into an action movie. People were screaming, and the police were barking orders trying to get the situation under control. I still remember the fear I felt in the pit of my stomach. Terror in its purest form. I hope you never know what it feels like to know that at any moment there could be a bullet with your name on it. One explosion close enough, and that was the end of your story. You turned into another number in the death toll. A name on a memorial wall.

She would pause there. Molly emptied two packets of Sweet-N-Low into her coffee.

And that's when I saw it coming for us. Did you know, there's a stage of fear when you just let it take over you? It seeps into every fiber of your being, seizing you in its cold, deathly grip, paralyzing you. I couldn't move. I couldn't even scream. Death was coming, and I couldn't even lift a hand to greet it.

A small smile played on Beth's face. She was proud of that line, but she had to keep the mood of the story up. Molly's spoon made gentle clinking sounds against the inside of her coffee cup.

And then he came. He stood right in front of me with his shield. That circular red white and blue disc is all that stood between me and my grave. But it was like the assault wasn't even there. I made it home that night because Captain America saved me. He protected me from certain death. I owe him my life. Beth stood there, carafe in hand, letting the story sink in. She still hadn't perfected the ending. Molly tapped her spoon against the edge of her mug before setting the piece of silverware down on her napkin.

"It's an incredible story," she remarked.

Beth smiled brightly. "And how's Monarch?" It was amazing how fast she could shift through moods.

"Good," Molly nodded. "We're signed on to cater a fundraising gala tonight, so that should be fun.

Beth gasped, delighted. "Ooh, a gala?" Her interest seemed to actually be piqued for once.

Molly straightened in her seat a little, letting a small smile curl at the edge of her lips. "Yeah, it's essentially for a bunch of the leading physicists of today to update their benefactors. You know, like a 'this is what we're working on and what we've discovered' and 'this is how you can use this knowledge and why it's worth your investment,' kind of thing," Molly paused, taking a sip out of her coffee.

"So a whole night of people talking about science?" Beth snorted. "Good luck with that."

"Well, it's being held at the new museum that just went up, so that should be cool to look at."

Beth simply nodded slowly.

"And I'm really hoping that this'll open the door to catering for some of the high society philanthropists."

"Great, so pancakes, right?" Beth responded, changing the topic. "Whole wheat? Low-fat syrup?"

"What? Oh, I don't want the low-fat, reg—" Molly stumbled over her words, recovering from the conversational whiplash.

"Molly," Beth sighed, already writing down the order.  "Low-fat is way better for you. It's time to start caring about eating healthy. Especially if you want to attract a man. Need to keep in shape for that," Beth winked. The thing about Beth was that she was fairly certain she knew more about Molly than anybody else.

Including Molly.

"I'm not really worried about that sort of thing," Molly protested immediately. She hated when Beth got on this subject. When anyone got on this subject, really.

"Oh. Well, good for you," Beth said, too brightly. "I'd be a mess if I were your age and still single. I mean, think about it. Suppose I met a guy and fell in love a week into being thirty. It'd take a year and a half to make sure I was really in love, and then another year to plan the wedding, so already I'd be like what, thirty-two and a half? Then once we're married there's like the ten months or so of getting things in order and making sure he'll be a good father. Which means I'd be thirty-four by the time I had the first kid, and that's if I got pregnant right away. That's eight years behind schedule. Seriously, if I don't have a kid by twenty-six, I'm going to adopt."

"That's only two years away, Beth." Beth kept Molly up to date on her birthdays.

"I know," Beth moaned. "So, I really need to get a move on with this whole husband thing. I mean I can't be the fifty and still raising kids."

"Excuse me, miss?" An older man at a nearby table raised his hand. Beth spun, sticking on a radiant smile.

"Yes, sir? How can I help you?" The singsong voice was back. Molly breathed out, glad the attention was off of her and her love life.

"Can my wife get a little more coffee?"

"Of course she can," Beth swept away from Molly's table and over to them. Her voice still chirping over the other noises of the café. "I'm so sorry. I just got a little caught up helping my friend through something. You know how it is." The worst part was that Beth honestly believed she was doing just that.

With Beth gone, Molly was left sitting alone and in blissful peace. It was these moments, with her cup of coffee and the sun shining through the window and the pleasant noises of silverware and soft conversations that brought her back to this booth. The little things, the small details, were always the most precious. She'd learned it from her father, and as if to prove his point, this small lesson seemed to stick with her and eclipse everything else he'd ever taught her. It was what kept her grounded in this big city which otherwise would have swallowed her whole. It was what made her so good at her job. Well, that and her memory.

"Excuse me." A woman appeared at the end of Molly's table. The wife of the man who called Beth away. "I'm sorry to interrupt your breakfast, but I just wanted to let you know, that you can't let that girl bring youd own," the woman stated earnestly. Molly blinked in surprise; it took her a second to realize that the woman was referring to Beth. "I had my youngest son at thirty-four, and he and I are perfectly healthy and happy to this day. You have kids when you're ready with your Mr. Right. Don't worry about what some bitch waitress says. It's your life." The woman gestured with her hand as if she was a politician making some key point in her address. "And God bless the man and children who have to deal with that." She nodded at Beth who was animatedly talking to a businessman who very obviously just wanted breakfast and not to have to deal with the chattering blonde.

"Oh, um, thank you, ma'am," Molly smiled, a bit bewildered as the woman smiled back before walking away to join her husband back at their table.

Maybe she would have to skip breakfast tomorrow.

[imnotcrazyidontthink]

I am so grateful to have artist + mental health activist Kate Elizabeth share her story on the blog today. Her story has really touched me and I hope it can do the same for you - Leon Else

Hello, I’m Kate Elisabeth. I’m a non-binary pansexual, which is a fancy way of saying I’m hella queer. I’m also an illustrator who fancies cartoons, and I’m also a mental health activist!

My experience with mental health goes a little deeper than just receiving a diagnosis and treatment. 

When I was 12 years old I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Hashimotos, where my immune system attacks my thyroid. I now need to take hormone replacements to make up for what my thyroid is lacking. After the diagnosis my parents assumed all of my apparent mental stress was a direct correlation to my autoimmune disease, rather than it being a separate Illness that needed its own attention. While it is true that Hashimotos can cause psychosis, the psychosis goes away once the thyroid is being treated. Mine stayed with me, like an unwanted roommate. 

I grew up in a dysfunctional household filled with marital issues and my parents having their own suppressed trauma and stress. My dad worked hard, and had worked hard his whole life. He depended on my mom to be able to take care of us when he was at work. She often did, and often did it quite well. But I think there were things she was unprepared to deal with, and she struggled to communicate this to her partner. 

My earliest memory of anxiety is when I was 6 years old, and I was unable to write a handful of thank you notes addressed to the students in my class. I remember feeling paralyzed by this sense of responsibility and I was so afraid of writing the wrong words. After all, I was 6 years old and didn’t have much experience writing anything at all. To be fair, my parents were unable to recognize this as anxiety because I don’t think they recognized their own for many, many years. Instead of asking me why I was stressed out, my mother criticized my inability to write the notes myself. She ended up doing it for me, and that was the first time I remember feeling like I had failed, and like I didn’t measure up. Moments like those throughout my childhood would have a direct correlation to the severe anxiety and depression that would develop later on.

 I remember I started hallucinating in fourth grade, and it would happen frequently when I was around 13. In fourth grade I remember visually hallucinating malformations on people’s faces or their body parts. I was probably 10 at this time and had no idea how to explain this to someone, so I went to the nurses office and told them I felt sick. I did that a lot during school, looking for reasons to go home sick so I could avoid seeing or hearing anything I didn’t want to see or hear.

 I began to isolate myself from family and friends as the years went on, and my parents attributed this to teen angst. I felt myself disconnecting from the world around me and I eventually lost my sense of self. By the time I was 16 I was on my third year of highschool and failing, while just doing the bare minimum to advance. I had no desire or will to live, and developed anorexia and other suicidal behaviors. 

When I was 17, I saw a psychiatrist and told him about my visual and auditory hallucinations, and he explained that I have schizophrenia, which is a grossly misunderstood form of psychosis. Unfortunately, his treatment methods got me nowhere, and I was briefly dependent on adderall. My parents stopped taking me to therapy, and I actually can’t say for sure what their reasons for that may have been, since there was always a persistent lack of communication.

 I graduated high school with mostly Ds, because my teachers all knew I was struggling and not receiving adequate treatment. It seemed like everyone besides my parents could realize that I needed intensive care and help.

During middle school, and into my junior year of high school, my main motivation for getting out of bed was artwork. I became known to everyone as the artist and that was the only facet of my identity. I would go to therapy for a few years on and off, but it was always me complaining about my parents, so no real progress on my mental health was made. I was under the impression that life was an illusion, and I had no way of being absolutely sure that the people around me were even real. Schizophrenia changes your perception of reality, and can cause delusional states of mind. It dulls your ability to feel strong emotions, and it can cause severe detachment from your sense of self. I legitimately felt like I was empty, and I couldn’t possibly imagine a brighter future.

 I became increasingly paranoid that people were lying to me about everything, and I had trust issues. I would spend weeks isolating myself in my room, accumulating piles of dirty dishes, trash, dirty clothes, etc. I was essentially living in my own misery. My mom often helped me clean my room, but became frustrated that I couldn’t keep it clean, There were times where she tried to not make me feel guilty, but I felt the guilt anyway. I remember always feeling like I had no control over anything.

When I was 18, I was raped repeatedly for two months by someone who I assumed I could trust. I was unable to leave my situation out of fear, denial, coercion, manipulation, and gaslighting. I started to smoke marijuana heavily during that time as a means of escapism. I was only able to leave that situation because he hit me over the head with a pair of drum sticks, and he was arrested and charged with domestic violence. 

I now have a restraining order against him. I also have a tattoo on my chest that he gave me without my consent, because I was under the influence of drugs. I remember standing in front of a mirror shirtless, then I remember being on a table getting tattooed. I don’t remember agreeing to getting anything tattooed. When it was over I tried to justify it and convince myself that I wanted this to happen. He treated me like a carnival prize that he had won, and he would objectify me to anyone who encountered us. He would tell me to take off my shirt and show people the tattoo that he gave me. I felt like a billboard for his own twisted personal brand of self aggrandizement. 

My mental health at the time was poor, even without the effects of drugs. I felt like what was happening to me was meant to happen as a means of punishment for not cleaning my room, not doing better in school, or whatever reason I could think of to explain cause of the abuse. I smoked weed every day for a year and a half to cope with everything. I’m 20 years old now, and I’ll be 21 on October 13th. It has taken me two and a half years to fully accept that it wasn’t my fault, and that blaming myself isn’t the answer. I couldn’t even talk about the sexual assault verbally without breaking down in tears until earlier this year.

That experience made me realize that life is not a delusion. Additionally, that I am in fact vulnerable to the same dangers as everyone else. I am not exempt from experiencing the impact of other people’s decisions.

This all made me reflect on my own life and the decisions I was making, as well as the people in my life. It has given me the motivation to take control over my college education, my career, and my art. I still suffer daily from all of my health issues, mental or otherwise, and the trauma of what I lived through. Although, what is different now is that I have a self awareness that could only have been gained from walking through Hell and coming out the other end alive. I also had to make a decision: I could either run away from my problems and ignore them, or I could actually get to know myself and figure out how to overcome these obstacles. 

This is a constant choice that I make every day. I can’t erase what happened to me, I can’t magically make my Hashimotos disappear, and I can’t cure my schizophrenia, but I can make the decision to try and live my best life despite it all. I strongly encourage all of you to do the same thing. I’m in school majoring in psychology now, and I am going to become a doctor in the field of psychiatry. I’m also still making art and I often enjoy it and find great pleasure in it. Having a creative outlet is so fundamental for your mental health. There’s an entire field of study for it, and it’s called art therapy.

If you’re depressed, have anxiety, OCD, or a broken leg, just know that positive things can and will happen when you make the conscious decision to help yourself. People will only understand that their depression or anxiety or mental illness can receive treatment if we educate and spread awareness. Suicide is an increasing epidemic because people are afraid to ask for help or talk about their feelings.

I encourage every one of you to understand the significance of mental health and why it’s morally ethical to assist those who need our help. If someone you know is suffering from depression or mental illness, or they’ve experienced a traumatic event, reach out to them and suggest they seek professional help and treatment.

There is hope, it gets better, and you are not alone.

Kate Elizabeth xo

[chapteronesucks]

Sci-Fi Isn’t ALL About Aliens

sci·ence fic·tion

ˈsīəns ˈˌfikSHən/

noun

fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets.

a form of fiction that draws imaginatively on scientific knowledge and speculation in its plot, setting, theme, etc.

I only added the definition so that we’re all on the same page while I express my free thoughts, i.e. rant. 

Obviously, by my blog name/title, you should know by now that I’m a huge fan of literature (and film media, basically any type of form of storytelling), but it irritates me to see people using the same type of Sci-Fi, i.e. space and aliens. 

Don’t get me wrong though, I absolutely love humans colonizing other planets only to be met with conflict of some sort (that’s good storytelling if you write it well), but honestly it’s been getting old because a lot of sources use the same style of plot which makes nearly every space movie seem the same. I just wanted to show some of my favorite types of sci-fi stories (shows, movies, and books) that weren’t all about aliens, because sometimes we forget about the cleverness of sci-fi if it doesn’t have aliens or space wars (I’m looking at you Star Wars).

Quick Side Note: Science Fiction and Fantasy are two different things

1. The Twilight Zone (1959 TV Series)

The Twilight Zone does have episodes where it has to do with space, aliens, and even invasion by aliens, but I included it because it has plenty of episodes about humans and how they are affected by their surrounding situations. The Twilight Zone not only made it’s audience question nearly everything, but it also made you question yourself and how you saw yourself in the world around you (this was a common theme for most Sci-Fi stories during this time); episodes like these would even surprise us more than we thought, which of course made The Twilight Zone one of the most famous shows throughout history. Sci-Fi during the age of The Twilight Zone was inspired a lot by not only the idea and mysteries of space but also by the enormous amount of questions of “What if...?”. But the best part of the series was not only the storytelling but the short epilogue that the narrator would leave the audience with. It made you feel wary and a bit forlorn after the stories ended with a sense of despair for the characters that the tales were about.

Spoilers Ahead:

In the episode “Time Enough At Last” we watch as a humble man struggles to get time for himself to simply read. By the end of the episode, an H-Bomb goes of and demolishes the entire area while the man was knocked unconscious in the bank’s vault that he worked at. After exiting the vault he realizes that the world around him is destroyed, but after a while, he quickly realizes that he now has all the time in the world to finally read in peace. While organizing all of the books he could ever want to read, he stumbles and drops and breaks his glasses. This makes it nearly impossible for him to see, which in turn ends the episode on a more depressing note. This episode may not seem much of a Sci-Fi based one, but it does show how one man reacts to the end of the world. Throughout the episode, you are given small hints of an impending apocalyptic situation. The bomb that was set off destroyed everything except for one man making the question of this episode, “ What if you were alone in the world?” or “What would you do with all of the time in the world?”. It may not seem like a hard sci-fi but it does fit with the fact of “major social or environmental changes” which are directly caused by the H-Bomb. The H-Bomb was a direct cause of the Apocalypse that we see at the end of the episode, except that we only see it from the POV of an introverted bookworm who only wants to read.

2. Get Out (2017 Movie)

For some reason a lot of people I talk to don’t see Get Out as a sci-fi movie? I’m here to tell you it’s clearly a sci-fi movie; it clearly has the characteristics AND actually shows you it’s own scientific theories that are played out in this world.

Quick Side Note: If you haven’t already seen Get Out then maybe you should check it out, especially if you like Sci-Fi/Horror films. It’s a treat of a film and seriously compelling.

Get Out was not only a captivating movie because it brought about a serious debate about race and how people saw each other, even when they thought they weren’t racist in any way (sorry to get political but this movie has a sense of politics and race surrounding), but it was a BRILLIANTLY told Sci-Fi film. As I said before a lot of people debated what category this movie qualified as (Somehow it was narrowed down to Mystery/Horror) but it’s still a Sci-Fi movie at the end of the day. (This is why I added the definition at the start of this post.)

Mild Spoilers Ahead:

Get Out is Sci-Fi because it gives a scientific theory in the story and it follows through and even proves to the audience that in this world this theory is proven and comes true. Get Out reminds me of old school Sci-Fi (i.e. Twilight Zone) was it factors around the thought of “What if people could live forever by...?” (I don’t want to directly spoil everything). This was the scientific theory that was proven in the climax of the movie, but nonetheless, it was science and because it is something that isn’t proven to be applied today (and hopefully never be applied) it can easily be qualified as Sci-Fi. The idea of Get Out was something that you would see in Twilight Zone (or Black Mirror for people who like the more modern stuff). This movie proves that you can have a likable Sci-Fi film that doesn’t have to involve aliens or even the mention of space (it was rated 99% on Rotten Tomatoes).

But seriously if you haven’t seen Get Out, GO WATCH IT NOW!

3. Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818 Novel)

Quick Side Note: The GIF is from the 1931 Frankenstein Movie

Frankenstein is a classic (literally, I mean it did come out in 1818) story that is categorized as Gothic Fiction, but sometimes also Science Fiction (which is true of course).

Quick Side Note: The primary narrator is Robert Walton, who, in his letters, quotes Victor Frankenstein’s first-person narrative at length; Victor, in turn, quotes the monster’s first-person narrative; in addition, the lesser characters Elizabeth Lavenza and Alphonse Frankenstein narrate parts of the story through their letters to Victor. (Found on Spark Notes: Frankenstein: Key Facts)

Spoilers Ahead?: I mean if you haven’t read a book that’s this old, then that’s on you. I mean isn’t this everyone's summer/class reading assignment at some point in high school?

Frankenstein, from my knowledge, is one of the earliest forms of Sci-Fi. It is an amazing story with complex layers for storytelling and character development that, like The Twilight Zone and other Sci-Fi stories, begs the question “What if man (i.e. humans) could create life?” or “What if that created life took revenge?” or “What are the consequences of playing God?”. I’m sure you get my point. There are literally so many questions that could be answered through this book, which proves how detailed and captivating this story is. Another thing that qualifies this story as Sci-Fi is the fact that (like in Get Out) it has a scientific theory that is proven. In the story, Doctor Frankenstein researches and studies the creation of life. I believe at some point in the story they actually talk about how he studied and the books read or classes he took? (Sorry, it’s been about 2 years since I’ve even glanced at the story, I can’t remember all the details.) They even give details about his workshop and where he created the monster so that the audience has an understanding of the conditions he worked under in order to complete his “dream”. Of course, after his theory was proven, and his creation came to life, he was quickly disgusted and frightened by what he’d done (which in turn causes the conflict we see later in the story). The majority of the story does fall directly under the category of Gothic Fiction, but because of the aspect of creating life through science it could also qualify as Sci-Fi, if you’re as determined as me.

I’m only going to list the three Sci-Fi examples because they are from three types of media. I just wanted you all to get the idea that there are amazing stories that are (or could) qualify as Science Fiction. I know lately, a lot of people tend to (for some reason) look down on Sci-Fi stories. Most audiences think that there need to be aliens, space wars, mind powers, or some abnormal disaster in order for it to be categorized as Science Fiction. I tend to appreciate the more human vs. human type of science fiction or something of that sort. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Jedi mind tricks and humans fighting against invading aliens, but I’d, sometimes, just like for people to stop making the “UGH!” face when they here the words: Science Fiction.

[amazonfreeebooksnffk211-blog]

Fascination About Sell My Books On Amazon

The 9-Minute Rule for Amazon Ebook Format

Smashwords is a preferred ebook aggregator and also disperses e-books to nearly all the top retailers, consisting of Kobo, i Bookstore, and also Barnes & Noble. They have comprehensive book formatting standards that enable easy conversion right into the styles called for by their numerous retail companions. On the other side, Smashwords does not disperse to Amazon, and also supplies no assistance with digital book format.

Smashwords takes a 10% cut on publications offered through their own retail channel, as well as 15% on publications sold via various other sellers-- this is in enhancement to the retailer's very own costs. Although Draft 2Digital has less retail companions than Smashwords, it disperses to Amazon as well as covers all the significant book stores. They have one more substantial benefit-- they will certainly style your e-book, and completely free.

Lulu is just one of the earliest on the internet self-publishing companies and a preferred distributor of digital and print books. They retail publications with their very own bookstore in addition to distribute to various other online stores (Amazon.com, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.) as well as publication distributors (Barnes & Noble as well as Ingram). Lulu uses both hardbound as well as book layouts for print publications.

The 2-Minute Rule for Kindle Ebook Publishing

For publications marketed via their marketplace, Lulu charges a 20% payment after deducting any kind of book manufacturing expenses relevant to publish copies. Sales produced through companion merchants would additionally attract their own payment. Bookbaby retails books via their very own Bookshop and distributes to other sellers too. Apart from posting as well as circulation, they likewise offer solutions such as modifying, cover and indoor design, as well as advertising and marketing.

All About Amazon Self Publishing

All solutions are paid. Ebooks make 100% aristocracies after subtracting the seller's compensation. Sales made via Bookshop, however, make 85% aristocracies. Bookbaby likewise has a print-on-demand service. Printed books generate royalties in between 10% as well as 30%. There are various other ways to publish as well as sell, too. As מלים an example, you can publish as well as market directly to your consumers from your very own Websites by making use of Gumroad.

If the goal is fulfilled, the company will certainly modify, design, release, distribute, and even market your book like a conventional author would certainly. Here are a couple of thinking factors: As Amazon dominates 80% of the book market, you must release directly with KDP as opposed to undergo an aggregator. http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=amazon ebook marketing You might select an aggregator/distributor for the remainder, or perhaps ignore them briefly if you're a brand-new author discovering the ropes.

Keep in mind, however, that if the various other retailers are omitted indefinitely, your book may never reach its sales possibility. Nevertheless, Kobo make up 25% of the Canadian market, as well as i Books for 30% of the Australian and also 10% of the overall market . It is best to experiment with all the major stores at some time in time, or for a few of your publications.

Additionally, you can go with Ingram Glow, Lulu, or Bookbaby because they use print-on-demand duplicates along with disperse to all the significant e-book retailers. If you choose the latter, remember to omit Amazon.com when you choose retailers from your supplier's checklist. Publish duplicates can not be sold without an ISBN , and it is much better to obtain one on your very own instead of utilize the one assigned by your posting service firm.

What Does Publish My Book Mean?

Royalty payment processes and repayment frequency may additionally vary throughout companies. Look up the Frequently asked questions on the firm sites or call assistance for certain inquiries. Discover about Editage's publication editing and enhancing as well as layout solutions! .

Professional translation services are available to authors fascinated in translating their KDP infiltrate various other languages, additionally widening their worldwide audience. Note: All equated publications must be published as new ASINs. Here are a few concerns you may wish to ask: The length of time will the translation take? Exactly how much will the translation expense? Are they an indigenous audio speaker of the wanted language? (Bear in mind, translators normally convert into their native language.) Will certainly they require specialized understanding to convert my book, i.e.

Not so long ago, the first obstacle for a hopeful publication author was to obtain past the gatekeepers. First you would need to spend weeks or months writing a book proposal as well as example phases. After that you could call a lot of representatives to see if they would want pitching your publication to significant publishers.

If they didn't ship the bundle back to you unopened, they would certainly either send you a kind rejection letter or make you a lowball deal. Different tools for self-publishing have actually removed these barriers for authors who like to go it alone. I'm one of them (see my blog post, "Twitter .

What Does Amazon E Book Do?

[+] versions it marketed a total amount of 4,000 duplicates in simply a few months. Many independently released writers come under one of two camps: Those marketing publications by themselves internet site utilizing an ecommerce device; and those offering just via Amazon.com. I started in the very first camp two years back when I utilized Eat Awesome .

[dearmyjimin]

Hey guys, this is GRACE (dearmyjimin), your resident Jungkook and Jimin stan. My blog has just hit it’s first-year anniversary and I wanted to start a series of yearly follow forever posts that serve as both a personal compilation of some fav graphics of my own (so that I can track how much I’ve grown as a designer), as well as to thank everyone who has helped me in one way or another. Each and every creation was made possible because of all the support I received. I wish to thank those who follow and support me, my lovely mutuals and friends who encourage me and all the blogs I follow for decorating my dash with amazing content. I am proud to be an ARMY and to stan 7 Kings who are the sources of inspiration behind my creations ♡

my mutuals - bolded ♡ - personal message under the cut

# - F

@97x95  | @acaracahehe ♡ | @aishjimin | @apgujeon | @artofennun | @ask-bts-stuff | @ask-joonie | @bangtannoonas | @bang-tan | @baobwi | @beui | @beuits | @bloominflowers | @booptae | @bwibelle | @bwink ♡ | @bwipsul | @bwiyomi | @chimcheroo | @chimchams | @chimchins | @chimilkeu | @comeherejimin ♡ | @cowjimin | @cyyphr | @deartaetae | @exolutelyx​ ♡ | @fhawn | @forjimin

G - L 

@gotjhope​ | @hobuing​ | @hohbi​ | @hoseokxx​ | @inkcassette​ | @jeongguk​ | @jeonheart | @jeonify​ | @jeonity ♡​ | @jeonsshi​ | @jiminrolls​ | @jimiyoong​ ♡ | @jinthebunny​ | @jjilljj​​ | @jjks​​ | @jpgtae​ | @junghope​ |  | @j-helpless​ | @j-cypher​ ♡ |  @kimdaily​ ♡ | @ktaebwi​ ♡ | @kthish​ ♡ | @kths​ | @kkumri​ | @kookiebuff​

M - R

@nerdjoonie​ | @nikkmonoxyls​ | @noranb​ | @maengion​ | @mangaetteok​ | @maja-sinika​ | @meitiandokaixin​ ♡ | @mewchim​ ♡ | @minblush​ ♡​ | @minpuffs​ | @mintsugakookies​ | @mintear​ | @park-jimizzle​ ♡​ | @pawjimin​​

S - Z 

@seonmuriya | @sosjimin ♡ | @sunbaejin | @sunshine-hobi | @sevenkookiejars ♡ |  @sweaterpawsjimin ♡ | @taeguk ♡ | @taebokkii | @taenekiii | @taevisual | @thumino | @tttaehyung | @wonkkyun | @yeoongi | @yoohnseok ♡ | @yoonem | @yoongles | @yoonseok ♡ | @yoongsins ♡ | @yoonmin | @war-of-hormoan | @wonpei | @vmiin

Personal Messages ♡ 

@acaracahehe + @sevenkookiejars + @meitiandokaixin // my bitches whom I know irl. Thanks for recognizing and supporting my passion for gfx and art. If it weren’t for you guys, I would not have gotten my graphic tablet and would not have started drawing chibis. Thank you guys ♡.

@bwink​ // Arden, my love. I can’t really remember how we became friends, but I am really happy and thankful that I managed to befriend you. You’re really cool, sweet and I love talking to you about anything and everything. Thanks for listening to me freak out about taekook, and for sending me random tk updates when I was away on my trip♡ . 

@comeherejimin​ // Cassie, my love. You’re one of my closest tumblr friends and I’m really happy to know you. I think we’ve confided in each other about a lot of issues that graphic designers struggle with and we relate really well with each other. Tbh, I’m really proud of your work and cannot stress enough about how talented you are. I know it’s hard to not equate notes with success, but as what we’ve always discussed, your passion is more important than whether people reblog your posts or not. Also, I really appreciate how you keep encouraging me, no matter how busy you are. You’re a true friend and I wish I could reach out through the screen to hug you personally. But I can’t so I can only say thank you and ily bb, don’t ever stop believing in yourself ♡!

@exolutelyx // Samaly, my love. Our history dates back all the way when I was still ass-deep in the exo fandom. You are one of the closest friends that tumblr gave me and I’m still very thankful that we were able to meet up in Singapore. Thank you for believing in me, and for being a huge supporter of my fics. Back then when you told me how much you loved ‘A Heart’s Worth’, it comforted me and encouraged me to write better. Also, thank you for entrusting me with all your problems as like how I entrust you with mine. Come to Singapore again and let’s hang out ^^♡.

@jeonity // Aly, my dear. I really can’t remember how we became friends, but I am just really glad that we are. I really enjoy talking to you on tumblr, how we just randomly throw shit from WINGS tour, to taekook, to FMVs etc. Thanks for listening to me rant when shit happens and for understanding my end of the story unlike others. I love all your quality gifs, keep up the good work ♡.

@j-cypher // Alice, alice, alice. You’re possibly the earliest friend I made on tumblr. Back then when I first posted my ryan rapmon art and squealed at what you wrote in your tags, I couldn’t even believe that we managed to become friends. I’m really thankful for your beautiful presence, how kind you are and how genuine you are. Thank you for replying all my asks so sincerely. I remember waking up to such long replies and I just thought that I found a special flower whom I would really love to befriend. Thank you, also, for entrusting me with your problems and struggles in university. I hope whatever advice I offered helped, and that your university years will be full of nothing but joy and happiness. Thank you for supporting my art, even when no one else did. You’re really special to me and I don’t always say this, but I love you aliceu ♡ thank you bb, for all your support ♡. 

@jimiyoong​ // Doris, my love. You are one of the very first few blogs who followed me - a potato account that posts random gfxs from time to time. I cannot express how thankful I am, for all your support. With each reblog, you help my blog grow to what it is today. I’m glad to have a friend like you, whom I can scream about yoonmin or just talk about random shit. I’m also really grateful that you’d alert me about reposters on twitter. You didn’t need to do it, but you do and I just don’t know what I did to deserve you as a friend. You’re amazing bb ♡.

@kimdaily // Sabbie. You’re one of the coolest Armys I have come to know and I really look up to you as a role model. You’re really chic, cool and most importantly, kind. Thank you for helping me QC namjoon’s coloured scans. Without your help, I would not have gotten his skin colour right. Thank you, also, for using the edit I did for you on your blog’s anniversary. I was really surprised and was just really emo that you’d used it. Thank you ;~; You’re an amazing Namjoon stan and I hope you’ll get to meet him one day for coffee ^^ ♡.

@ktaebwi // Rin my dear, you’re my #1 passion-fruit-green-tea homie (yeah man)! I have a lot of things to thank you for, and the one I’m the most grateful for, was that time you helped me reblog a call-out post of this blogger who reuploaded my gfx without my permission. At that time, we weren’t mutuals and I was just surprised that you’d extend help to me (some random noobie potato plant). At that moment, the first thing that came to my mind was, “she’s so kind to help me, what did I do to deserve her help?” and that’s probably the reason why I love you, your blog and look up to you as a fellow ARMY. Thank you for your neverending patience when I scream about taekook (I tend to get carried away) and for recommending me so many lovely fics. I think you’re someone who’s really good with information, languages and the way you comprehend situations in a matured manner makes me proud to be your friend. Translating and doing gifs are hard, and you often meet cheaters and reposters, nonetheless, thank you for your hard work and the fandom is really lucky to have you ♡.

@kthish // Alex, my dear. You’re one of the sweetest, kindest, loveliest person I’ve ever come to know, do you know that? You’re really encouraging and you always send me such lovely praises for my gfx that leave me blushing and squirming all the way across the globe. Thank you love, for believing in me when I don’t believe in myself. I’m really thankful to have you as a friend and enjoy those little moments when you’d send me art, gifs etc on tumblr that just make my day brighter and happier. Thank you love, you deserve nothing but the best. Thank you for your HQ gifs and for sharing your talent with the fandom ♡.

@mewchim // Jenny, my love. idk if I have said this enough, but you’re really one of the best graphic designers I have ever come to know on tumblr. I always say this in my tags, that if you’d give me any section or corner or inch of your work, I can tell, right away, that it’s done by you. You have this amazing unique style that no one else can replicate. I get really blushie and emo whenever you reblog my stuff and add praises. You’re like a gfx designer role model to me and whenever you praise me, I get so happy my heart soars. Thank you, love, for all your support and your encouragement. I gain inspiration from your work and will never stop harping about how much I adore you and your designs. Keep up the good work. I will always support you ♡.

@minblush // Zuzu. I think I have a whole long list of things to thank you for, even if we don’t speak to each other frequently. When I first followed you, back when I wasn’t even dearmyjimin yet, I thought you are really admirable. You aren’t afraid to speak up about issues and be firm about opinions. That’s something that I can never do, and I find strength in the way you carry yourself as a jimin-stan, how you defend him better than anyone else can. Thank you for always speaking up about jimin stereotypes that aren’t true, for educating all of us even if some can’t take your words well. I get really upset when I see people argue with you, esp when they misunderstand you. Also, thank you for being with me throughout the time I had to deal with you-know-who reposting my jimin coloured scans on twitter + coming at me at full force. Thank you for giving me advice on how to deal with the situation and for listening to me. I ain’t lying when I said that I really look up to you and respect you. Thank you so much ;~; ♡.

@park-jimizzle // Steph, my love. You’re one of my favourite jimin blogs! I get really happy whenever I see your gifsets on my dash, and just marvel at how much time and effort you put into those gifsets. Thank you so much, for contributing to the fandom and for giving us such HQ gifs. Thank you for tagging me in all sorts of jimin and vmin posts, they make me really happy and they brighten up my day so much. I’m glad that I can talk to you about random stuff, from bts to just everyday life. Thank you for listening to me and for chatting with me. You’re amazing, bb ♡.

@sosjimin // Bia, my love. You’re really one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever known. You’re a living embodiment of a goddess. You’re gorgeous, pretty, kind, sweet, understanding and just really hilarious sometimes (yes, I read your tweets and wonder why am I your mutual) :D You’re amazing bb. Thank you for sharing your HQ gifsets with the fandom and for sending me words of encouragement. They mean a lot to me. You’re really easy to talk to and I know that I can scream at you about anything and everything. Thank you for loving Minjoon along with me♡. 

@sweaterpawsjimin // Whitney, my dear. The first time I started speaking to you, was last year, before the MAMA awards. Back then, I wasn’t even dearmyjimin yet, and i used to send you asks about my love for jimin, and you’d reply them so patiently. Thank you for answering them, and for listening to me gush about Jimin. My impression of you was just this selfless, patient and cool ARMY who was so damn good at making HQ gifs. Thank you for reaching out to me on twitter to talk about you-know-who reposting gifs and other people’s creations. I’m sorry that you have to deal with those people, and I’m actually really glad to see the watermarks you place on your gifs these days. Still, I’m glad for all the advice you offered me and thankful that you listened to me rant. I don’t know how we became friends, but I am glad that we did. Even if we don’t talk very often, I will support you and your blog, regardless of the direction that you wish to take. Thank you for being that amazing Jimin stan that I can look up to. Ily♡! 

@taeguk // Alicia, my love. You’re one of the sweetest girls i’ve come to know. Thank you for helping me with my taehyung and jungkook coloured scans. Without your help, I wouldn’t have been able to get their skin colours right. Also, thank you for listening to me rant when I complain about how heartbroken I get when people reupload my original creations. And you gave me a very important piece of advice that: reposters are everywhere, but what they can’t steal is the passion I hold for creating. That really kicked some sense into me and even if I get really sour about people resposting my stuff, I try to remember what you said and push myself to focus on the moment and ignore everything else that is weighing me down. Thank you for all the support and encouragement you gave me. With every reblog you made, you helped my blog grow and I’m immensely grateful for that. Thank you bb. Ily ♡.

@yoohnseok // Corey, my love. I don’t know what I did in my past life to get you as a friend, but I’m really glad that I did. You’re really one of the most approachable, loveliest ARMYs I have come to know. You take whatever shit I have, and reply my texts with all your positivity. I can’t ever forget our first kakaotalk call. I felt so flustered speaking to you, from across the globe and just can’t believe that it’s you whom I was talking to. I really love your passion for graphic designing and I remember scrolling through your gfx tag and just marvelling at your creations. Keep up the good work Corey♡. ily! 

@yoonseok // Kat, my dear. I think I can never forget the day that I plucked up the courage to speak to you. Back then when you were still syubprince and I was 95zlinez, I remember sending you a message and asking if you could do me a favour to delete what you reblogged and to reblog my edited version (cause I made some dumb error in my edit). What struck me the most was that you kindly extended the favour and even added that you liked my graphic. I think when I read your message, I had a mini mental breakdown because I looked up to you a lot (still do) and was so jittery because someone whom I respected a lot told me she liked my graphic. It was an amazing experience that I cannot forget. You were also one of the blogs that helped me grow as a designer/ artist and I cannot express how thankful I am. I don’t think I could have gotten where I am now, if you weren’t there to support me in the first place. Thank you so much♡.

@yoongsins // Jess, my love. Personally, you’re the best graphic designer that I’ve come to know. I think I’ve told you many times before, back then when I wasn’t dearmyjimin yet. Even until now, I mean every word I say, that you’re a source of inspiration to me. I’d go through your graphics tag and just be in awe with the way you design, how you challenge new styles and new perspectives. It’s something really admirable, something that I can’t ever do, and that’s the reason why I look up to you a lot. The fandom is really lucky to have you, not only for your lovely creations, but the way you inject positivity and hope in your replies. You’re also one of the earliest blogs that helped me grow as a designer. If it weren’t for your support, I doubt I could have made it this far. Thank you so much♡. 

[tainghekhongdaycomvn]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexing

Is mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

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http://ift.tt/2CoP9eY xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO? http://ift.tt/2CoP9eY xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO? http://ift.tt/2CoP9eY Bạn có thể xem thêm địa chỉ mua tai nghe không dây tại đây http://ift.tt/2mb4VST

[dainiaolivahm]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexingIs mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2A3spvj

[christinesumpmg]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexingIs mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2A3spvj

[rodneyevesuarywk]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexingIs mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2A3spvj

[maryhare96]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexingIs mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2A3spvj

[mariasolemarionqi]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexingIs mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2A3spvj

[fairchildlingpo1]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexingIs mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2A3spvj

[christinesumpmg1]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexingIs mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2A3spvj

[lawrenceseitz22]

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexing

Is mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

Posted by bridget.randolph

We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.

But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?

IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!

In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.

What is “mobile-first indexing”?

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.

It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.

However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.

This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.

What should I do about mobile-first indexing?

The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.

According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).

That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:

Content: make sure your mobile version has all the high-quality, valuable content that exists on your desktop site. This could include text, videos and images. Make sure the formats used on the mobile version are crawlable and indexable (including alt-attributes for images).

Structured data: you should include the same structured data markup on both the mobile and desktop versions of the site. URLs shown within structured data on mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL. Avoid adding unnecessary structured data if it isn’t relevant to the specific content of a page.

Metadata: ensure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both versions of all pages.

Note that the official guidance says “equivalent” rather than “identical” - you may still want to optimize your mobile titles for shorter character counts, but make sure the same information and relevant keywords are included.

Hreflang: if you use rel=hreflang for internationalization, your mobile URLs' hreflang annotations should point to the mobile version of your country or language variants, and desktop URLs should point to the desktop versions.

Social metadata: OpenGraph tags, Twitter cards and other social metadata should be included on the mobile version as well as the desktop version.

XML and media sitemaps: ensure that any links to sitemaps are accessible from the mobile version of the site. This also applies to robots directives (robots.txt and on-page meta-robots tags) and potentially even trust signals, like links to your privacy policy page.

Search Console verification: if you have only verified your desktop site in Google Search Console, make sure you also add and verify the mobile version.

App indexation: if you have app indexation set up for your desktop site, you may want to ensure that you have verified the mobile version of the site in relation to app association files, etc.

Server capacity: Make sure that your host servers can handle increased crawl rate.

(This only applies for sites with their mobile version on a separate host, such as m.domain.com.)

Switchboard tags: if you currently have mobile switchboard tags implemented, you do not need to change this implementation. These should remain as they are.

Common questions about mobile-first indexing

Is mobile-first indexing adding mobile pages to a separate mobile index?

With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.

Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?

Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”

Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:

“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. “We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”

Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?

Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).

That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).

When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?

The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.

It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.

Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.

What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?

If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).

What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?

The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.

How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?

This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.

Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.

Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?

Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.

If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).

With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.

Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?

If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.

If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).

Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?

No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.

Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2lFAwJe via SW Unlimited