Yesterday, at SMX West during the mobile-first index panel, I asked Gary Illyes of Google what is the hold back on launching the mobile-first index.
Gary Illyes responded that Google is looking to see a "quality neutral" launch. That means that when they flip the switch to be a mobile-first index, they don't want the search results to change much. They want the quality of the search results to pretty much be at the same level or a bit better. If they do not see a "quality neutral" data set, they will not launch.
Getting to "quality neutral" is not easy and it is tricky he said. They are looking at a whole new web, a mobile web, and it is a whole new index. So it is tricky.
Gary has said this before but always nice to hear him say it at a show.
Here are some tweets from the session on this point:
.@methode G is looking for a quality neutral launch. It's looking for the signals that are missing for the m-first index & replace them #smx
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 22, 2017
Google is aiming for quality-neutral when lanchning MFI. @methode #SMX
— Kenichi Suzuki; 鈴木謙一 (@suzukik) March 22, 2017
Google aiming for quality neutral launch with mobile first. They don't want to see user's results be less quality. @methode #smx
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) March 22, 2017
Aiming for a "quality neutral launch" with mobile first indexing #mobilefirstindexing #smx #12a @methode
— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) March 22, 2017
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable