So, what's the big deal?
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 8:50 am
The concern, which Google engineers have no doubt studied internally, is that mobile websites often strip away content and links to improve the user experience on smaller screens. This shortened content fundamentally changes the link structure, which is one of the most important factors in Google’s ranking. Our goal is to try to understand the impact of this.
Before we get started, one big unknown variable I want to quickly address is that we don’t know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots . Perhaps bangladesh number data will only choose to go “mobile first” on sites that have historically exposed the same codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of the Google bot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not to just go “mobile first” but actually went “mobile only.”
Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale
For this short study, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I will then crawl them two levels deep, impersonating both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of the Googlebot. With this data, we can start to compare how different the link structure of the web looks.
Before we get started, one big unknown variable I want to quickly address is that we don’t know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots . Perhaps bangladesh number data will only choose to go “mobile first” on sites that have historically exposed the same codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of the Google bot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not to just go “mobile first” but actually went “mobile only.”
Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale
For this short study, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I will then crawl them two levels deep, impersonating both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of the Googlebot. With this data, we can start to compare how different the link structure of the web looks.