Google Still Moving Over Sites to Mobile-First Indexing 5 Months After Deadline Google Still No Closer to Finishing Mobile-First Indexing, says Mueller
Written by: Nicole McCormick Categories - In The News, SEO
After numerous delays and two years of waiting, Google is still no closer to completing the process of moving every website to mobile-first indexing, according to recent comments from John Mueller.
Google first announced that all websites across the globe would be moved over to mobile-first indexing back in July 2019. What this means is that Google would start crawling and indexing all sites moved over to mobile-first indexing based on how they appear on mobile devices.
By early 2020, Google anticipated that this process would be completed in September of that year. This deadline was later pushed back to March 2021.
In March, Search Engine Round Table reported that Google would soon finish migrating the last group of sites to mobile-first indexing.
Five months have since passed and Google has still not yet completed this process.
Now, John Mueller is speaking out on the matter, explaining that Google is “still working on it.”
We’re still working on moving the remaining sites over to MFI. If you’re sure that things are set up well on your end, I wouldn’t try to “force” it — my assumption is we’re just not on the batch that includes your site at the moment. Also, MFI is not just MF, it’s the content.
Mueller didn’t provide an ETA for when we can expect the migration to be completed, but based on Google’s track record with this, we won’t be holding our breaths. We’ll keep you updated when Google announces that this process is, in fact, complete.
Nicole is a wordsmith wizard, passionate about the written word and an avid storyteller who uses creatively crafted prose to help bring your brand’s story to the next level. A former journalist with writing credits in both local and national news publications and a few newspaper awards under her belt, Nicole now enjoys telling your stories and finding new and creative ways to create valuable content that resonates with audiences in the digital landscape.
Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads have been updated with three new features, Google announced earlier this week. Among the additions are New customer acquisition goals, new Performance Max insights reports, and a one-click upgrade tool for Smart Shopping. Let’s dig right in and see how these features can help drive your business!
New Customer Acquisition Goals
You can now use your data to help Google identify (and target) new customers with PMax campaigns. This feature should help you identify who’s a new sure, who’s an old one, which will definitely help with the strategy. There are a few options available:
Customer Match Lists – When first-party data is uploaded (name, email, phone, country, postal code), Google gives a match rate that shows how many of your customers have a matching Google account that can be used for targeting. Much cooler than third-party cookies, eh?
Conversion Tags – using them might help the new feature cut out people that aren’t new
Google’s Autodetection Method – Besides the previously seen Google detected purchase conversion tracking in Smart Shopping, Performance Max also has new machine learning models that predict whether a user is a new customer or an existing customer.
Performance Max Insights Reports
Photo source: support.google.com
If you’re looking for more information on campaign performance, you will be pleased with this new feature. There are two new additions to the insights page:
Asset Audience Insights – this will tell you how text, images and videos ‘resonate with specific customer segments’. That means you will be able to see what your customers engage more with, with what content. Using those insights, you can customize your marketing strategy!
Diagnostic Insights – these insights will show you all the issues that might prevent your ads from showing. It will also give you some suggestions on how to fix it.
One-click Upgrade Tool For Smart Shopping
This will begin rolling out soon, Google said, and Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will no longer exist. You’ll get notified when the tool becomes available and after you upgrade it, a new Performance Max campaign will be generated and keep the information from previous campaigns.
Here’s how to upgrade:
Why Is This Important?
You already know that tracking everything is the key to success. Well, one of the keys. These additional insights will not only help you keep track of your customers’ engagement and preferences, but will help you develop and customize your marketing strategy. Like it or not, Performance Max is alive and kicking and adapting to it sounds like the smartest choice.
For the first time in the last 20 years, Google wasn’t the most popular web address in a year – the title now belongs to TikTok.
The social video app owned by ByteDance has been a key digital platform for a while now. Gaining popularity during the pandemic, TikTok is now an opinion-maker of its kind and a go-to solution for targeting the younger generation, Gen Z.
According to Cloudfare, TikTok gained (and remained) number one in the global ranking on August 10, 2021. Before that, it was a back and forth battle with Google, but since then, the video app has mostly taken the lead.
Even though Google managed to come first again a few times, it didn’t win for the holidays. On Black Friday, TikTok rose again – a key fact for e-commerce businesses that rely on Google during the holidays shopping spree.
In comparison, TikTok was number seven in ranking after Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and Amazon in 2020.
The app now has more than 1 billion monthly active users and doubled down on privacy, ad measurement and commerce, so it isn’t surprising that brands and marketers are getting more comfortable with advertising on it. The fact that the number of consumers exposed to ads nearly doubled, going to 37% this year, also helps.
After managing to surpass the potential ban in the U.S last year, TikTok continued attracting users and gaining more downloads. It became the first non-Facebook mobile app to surpass 3 billion downloads.
While staying in touch with its users and adapting to changes such as the return of longer videos, TikTok might have the potential to become a leader in the advertisement in the future.
The Year’s Winners By Cloudfare
Top 10 — Most popular domains (late) 2021
TikTok.com
Google.com
Facebook.com
Microsoft.com
Apple.com
Amazon.com
Netflix.com
YouTube.com
Twitter.com
WhatsApp.com
Top 10 — Most popular social media domains (late) 2021