Nearly every booking at our dive centre on Nusa Ceningan starts on a phone. Guests plan the trip on a phone, compare dive shops on a phone, and send messages about the next day's dive while browsing a website on the fast boat from Sanur. In the year and a half since Ceningan Divers opened, we have rarely, if ever, seen a guest use a laptop to look the business up.
When Google announced in November that it had begun experimenting with indexing the mobile version of websites first, the change appeared overdue. A review of what many tourism sites actually display on a phone, however, reveals a real cause for concern.
What has Google announced about mobile-first indexing?
That it will use the mobile version of a page as the main version for indexing and ranking. At present, Google crawls and ranks a site based on its desktop version, with the mobile version playing a secondary role. If a desktop page contains a long course description and the mobile page shows three lines and a "book now" button, Google still evaluates the business on the longer version.
The announcement reverses this. Content that is not present on the phone version will effectively be invisible to Google.
The change will not happen overnight. Google describes it as a series of experiments and says it will proceed carefully, and nobody outside Google knows how long the transition will take. Estimates range from a few weeks to a year or two. The rollout is likely to be slower than the alarm on SEO forums suggests, but we do not recommend waiting to find out.
What is the problem with many mobile sites?
Missing content. Many tourism sites, dive shops included, currently share this issue.
Many were built four or five years ago, when a "mobile site" often meant a separate, reduced version, sometimes on a different address (the m-dot setup), sometimes a theme that hides half the page below a certain screen width because the designer considered it cluttered. In both cases, the phone version is a summary. Prices are missing, as are course details and the reviews section. The long page describing the dive sites is reduced to a photo and a sentence.
These choices were not made carelessly. The assumption was that phone users wanted less: quick information, a phone number and a map. That may once have been true; it is no longer the case. People now research an entire trip on a phone, read every detail about the PADI Open Water course and compare prices among three shops on the same island. They want more information, not less.
And Google is about to read the reduced version.
Are responsive sites affected?
Generally not. A responsive site uses the same HTML, which simply rearranges itself on a smaller screen, so the content and the page are identical. Most well-built Drupal and WordPress themes adopted this approach some time ago, and it now pays off without additional work.
The problems lie with separate mobile sites and with themes that use CSS or scripts to remove content on small screens.
What should be checked on a mobile site this month?
A specialized audit tool is not required; a phone and a laptop are sufficient.
- Open a page on a desktop computer and the same page on a phone. Scroll to the bottom of both.
- Check whether every piece of text on the desktop page also appears on the phone page: prices, course content, FAQ, address and opening hours.
- Confirm that the images are present, with the same alt text.
- If the site uses structured data (schema markup for the business, reviews or events), confirm that it is also in the mobile version. On m-dot sites, it often is not, because it was added only to the desktop template.
- Check that page titles and meta descriptions are the same, or at least of equal quality.
The last point is frequently overlooked. Some separate mobile sites use the same generic title on every page, consisting only of the business name. This had no consequence while Google ignored the mobile page; it will now.
Do tabs and accordions reduce the value of content?
Not under mobile-first indexing, provided the content is in the page. This is the question raised most often. For years, SEO guidance held that content hidden behind a tab or a "read more" toggle carried less weight, on the reasoning that important content would be displayed. On a phone, however, accordions are practically necessary; nobody wants to scroll through twelve screens of course description.
Google representatives have stated publicly that under mobile-first indexing, content in tabs and accordions will receive full weight, as long as it is actually present in the page. That condition is essential. Content hidden behind a tap is acceptable. Content that is not loaded at all, or that a script retrieves only after a tap, is a different matter: Google must be able to see it in the page it renders.
The rule is therefore simple: content may be collapsed, but it must not be removed.
Which other mobile changes require attention now?
Intrusive popups and page speed. Mobile-first indexing is not the only change under way. Since January 10 of this month, Google has been lowering the ranking of mobile pages that display a large intrusive popup as soon as a visitor arrives from search, a change announced last August. Every full-screen "join our newsletter" overlay on a phone is now a ranking problem, not merely an irritation. A small banner is acceptable; a full-screen barrier before any content can be read is not.
Speed also matters. Many dive guests view websites on hotel wifi or an unreliable 3G signal on a boat. A homepage with a large slider of ten uncompressed photos will lose them long before Google forms an assessment.
Sites not yet registered in Search Console should be added. The Mobile Usability report identifies the pages Google already considers problematic on phones, and Google's Mobile-Friendly Test evaluates a URL in about a minute. Neither tool checks for missing content, however; for that, the scroll test remains necessary.
What impact should small businesses expect?
For most small businesses, the ranking change itself will probably be smaller than the attention it is receiving. The sites most affected will be those that remain on a flawed m-dot setup without taking action.
The greater benefit is indirect. Working through the checklist above and correcting the issues found produces better phone pages, and better phone pages lead to more bookings. That benefit is independent of Google and applies whether the rollout happens next month or in two years.
Google has published its own explanation of its requirements, its guide to mobile-first indexing: the same content, the same structured data, the same metadata and images that load. We recommend reading it alongside the scroll test.
Significant gaps, or an old separate mobile site, usually indicate that the site needs a proper redesign rather than a patch. A technical SEO review identifies the remaining issues, such as blocked resources and lazy-loaded content that Google cannot see.
Guests are already reading websites on their phones. Google is adapting to that reality.