It's happened to all of us. You bring up a webpage on your mobile device, only to find out that a feature you were accustomed to using on desktop simply isn't available on mobile. While frustrating, it has always been a struggle for web developers and designers alike to simplify and condense their site on mobile screens without needing to strip features or content that would otherwise clutter a smaller viewport. The worst-case scenario for these trade-offs is that some features would be reserved for desktop environments, or perhaps a user might be able to opt out of the mobile view. Below is an example of how my personal blog displays the mobile version using a popular plugin by ElegantThemes called HandHeld. As you can see, the vast page is heavily stripped down and is far easier to read... but at what cost? And at what cost to the link graph?
My personal blog drops 75 of the 87 links, and all of the external links, when the mobile version is accessed. So what happens when the mobile versions of sites become the primary way the web is accessed, at scale, by the bots which power major search engines?
Google's announcement to proceed with a mobile-first index raises new questions about how the link structure of the web as a whole might be influenced once these truncated web experiences become the first (and sometimes only) version of the web Googlebot encounters.
So, what's the big deal?
The concern, which no doubt Google engineers have studied internally, is that mobile websites often remove content and links in order to improve user experience on a smaller screen. This abbreviated content fundamentally alters the link structure which underlies one of the most important factors in Google's rankings. Our goal is to try and understand the impact this might have.
Before we get started, one giant unknown variable which I want to be quick to point out is we don't know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots. Perhaps Google will choose to be "mobile-first" only on sites that have historically displayed an identical codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of Googlebot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not only to go "mobile-first," but in fact to go "mobile-only."
Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale
For this brief research, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I would then crawl two levels deep, spoofing both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of Googlebot. With this data, we can begin to compare how different the link structure of the web might look.
Homepage metrics
Let's start with some descriptive statistics of the home pages of these 20,000 randomly selected sites. Of the sites analyzed, 87.42% had the same number of links on their homepage regardless of whether the bot was mobile- or desktop-oriented. Of the remaining 12.58%, 9% had fewer links and 3.58% had more. This doesn't seem too disparate at first glance.
Perhaps more importantly, only 79.87% had identical links on the homepage when visited by desktop and mobile bots. Just because the same number of links were found didn't mean they were actually the same links. This is important to take into consideration because links are the pathways which bots use to find content on the web. Different paths mean a different index.
Among the homepage links, we found a 7.4% drop in external links. This could mean a radical shift in some of the most important links on the web, given that homepage links often carry a great deal of link equity. Interestingly, the biggest "losers" as a percentage tended to be social sites. In retrospect, it seems reasonable that one of the common types of links a website might remove from their mobile version would be social share buttons because they're often incorporated into the "chrome" of a page rather than the content, and the "chrome" often changes to accommodate a mobile version.
The biggest losers as a percentage in order were:
- linkedin.com
- instagram.com
- twitter.com
- facebook.com
So what's the big deal about 5–15% differences in links when crawling the web? Well, it turns out that these numbers tend to be biased towards sites with lots of links that don't have a mobile version. However, most of those links are main navigation links. When you crawl deeper, you just find the same links. But those that do deviate end up having radically different second-level crawl links.
Second-level metrics
Now this is where the data gets interesting. As we continue to crawl out on the web using crawl sets that are influenced by the links discovered by a mobile bot versus a desktop bot, we'll continue to get more and more divergent results. But how far will they diverge? Let's start with size. While we crawled an identical number of home pages, the second-tier results diverged based on the number of links found on those original home pages. Thus, the mobile crawlset was 977,840 unique URLs, while the desktop crawlset was 1,053,785. Already we can see a different index taking shape — the desktop index would be much larger. Let's dig deeper.
I want you to take a moment and really focus on this graph. Notice there are three categories:
- Mobile Unique: Blue bars represent unique items found by the mobile bot
- Desktop Unique: Orange bars represent unique items found by the desktop bot
- Shared: Gray bars represent items found by both
Notice also that there are there are four tests:
- Number of URLs discovered
- Number of Domains discovered
- Number of Links discovered
- Number of Root Linking Domains discovered
Now here is the key point, and it's really big. There are more URLs, Domains, Links, and Root Linking Domains unique to the desktop crawl result than there are shared between the desktop and mobile crawler. The orange bar is always taller than the gray. This means that by just the second level of the crawl, the majority of link relationships, pages, and domains are different in the indexes. This is huge. This is a fundamental shift in the link graph as we have come to know it.
And now for the big question, what we all care about the most — external links.
A whopping 63% of external links are unique to the desktop crawler. In a mobile-only crawling world, the total number of external links was halved.
What is happening at the micro level?
So, what's really causing this huge disparity in the crawl? Well, we know it has something to do with a few common shortcuts to making a site "mobile-friendly," which include:
- Subdomain versions of the content that have fewer links or features
- The removal of links and features by user-agent detecting plugins
Of course, these changes might make the experience better for your users, but it does create a different experience for bots. Let's take a closer look at one site to see how this plays out.
This site has ~10,000 pages according to Google and has a Domain Authority of 72 and 22,670 referring domains according to the new Moz Link Explorer. However, the site uses a popular WordPress plugin that abbreviates the content down to just the articles and pages on the site, removing links from descriptions in the articles on the category pages and removing most if not all extraneous links from the sidebar and footer. This particular plugin is used on over 200,000 websites. So, what happens when we fire up a six-level-deep crawl with Screaming Frog? (It's great for this kind of analysis because we can easily change the user-agent and restrict settings to just crawl HTML content.)
The difference is shocking. First, notice that in the mobile crawl on the left, there is clearly a low number of links per page and that number of links is very steady as you crawl deeper through the site. This is what produces such a steady, exponential growth curve. Second, notice that the crawl abruptly ended at level four. The site just didn't have any more pages to offer the mobile crawler! Only ~3,000 of the ~10,000 pages Google reports were found.
Now, compare this to the desktop crawler. It explodes in pages at level two, collecting nearly double the total pages of the mobile crawl at this level alone. Now, recall the graph before showing that there were more unique desktop pages than there were shared pages when we crawled 20,000 sites. Here is confirmation of exactly how it happens. Ultimately, 6x the content was made available to the desktop crawler in the same level of crawl depth.
But what impact did this have on external links?
Wow. 75% of the external, outbound links were culled in the mobile version. 4,905 external links were found in the desktop version while only 1,162 were found in the mobile. Remember, this is a DA 72 site with over twenty thousand referring domains. Imagine losing that link because the mobile index no longer finds the backlink. What should we do? Is the sky falling?
Take a deep breath
Mobile-first isn't mobile-only
The first important caveat to all this research is that Google isn't giving up on the desktop — they're simply prioritizing the mobile crawl. This makes sense, as the majority of search traffic is now mobile. If Google wants to make sure quality mobile content is served, they need to shift their crawl priorities. But they also have a competing desire to find content, and doing so requires using a desktop crawler so long as webmasters continue to abbreviate the mobile versions of their sites.
This reality isn't lost on Google. In the Original Official Google Mobile First Announcement, they write...
If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.
Google took the time to state that a desktop version can be better than an "incomplete mobile version." I don't intend to read too much into this statement other than to say that Google wants a full mobile version, not just a postcard.
Good link placements will prevail
One anecdotal outcome of my research was that the external links which tended to survive the cull of a mobile version were often placed directly in the content. External links in sidebars like blog-rolls were essentially annihilated from the index, but in-content links survived. This may be a signal Google picks up on. External links that are both in mobile and desktop tend to be the kinds of links people might click on.
So, while there may be fewer links powering the link graph (or at least there might be a subset that is specially identified), if your links are good, content-based links, then you have a chance to see improved performance.
I was able to confirm this by looking at a subset of known good links. Using Fresh Web Explorer, I looked up fresh links to toysrus.com which is currently gaining a great deal of attention due to stores closing. We can feel confident that most of these links will be in-content because the articles themselves are about the relevant, breaking news regarding Toys R Us. Sure enough, after testing 300+ mentions, we found the links to be identical in the mobile and desktop crawls. These were good, in-content links and, subsequently, they showed up in both versions of the crawl.
Selection bias and convergence
It is probably the case that popular sites are more likely to have a mobile version than non-popular sites. Now, they might be responsive — at which point they would yield no real differences in the crawl — but at least some percentage would likely be m.* domains or utilize plugins like those mentioned above which truncate the content. At the lower rungs of the web, older, less professional content is likely to have only one version which is shown to mobile and desktop devices alike. If this is the case, we can expect that over time the differences in the index might begin to converge rather than diverge, as my study looked only at sites that were in the top million and only crawled two levels deep.
Moreover (this one is a bit speculative), but I think over time that there will be convergence between a mobile and desktop index. I don't think the link graphs will grow exponentially different as the linked web is only so big. Rather, the paths to which certain pages are reached, and the frequency with which they are reached, will change quite a bit. So, while the link graph will differ, the set of URLs making up the link graph will largely be the same. Of course, some percentage of the mobile web will remain wholly disparate. The large number of sites that use dedicated mobile subdomains or plugins that remove substantial sections of content will remain like mobile islands in the linked web.
Impact on SERPs
It's difficult at this point to say what the impact on search results will be. It will certainly not leave the SERPs unchanged. What would be the point of Google making and announcing a change to its indexing methods if it didn't improve the SERPs?
That being said, this study wouldn't be complete without some form of impact assessment. Hat tip to JR Oakes for giving me this critique, otherwise I would have forgotten to take a look.
First, there are a couple of things which could mitigate dramatic shifts in the SERPs already, regardless of the veracity of this study:
- A slow rollout means that shifts in SERPs will be lost to the natural ranking fluctuations we already see.
- Google can seed URLs found by mobile or by desktop into their respective crawlers, thereby limiting index divergence. (This is a big one!)
- Google could choose to consider, for link purposes, the aggregate of both mobile and desktop crawls, not counting one to the exclusion of the other.
Second, the relationships between domains may be less affected than other index metrics. What is the likelihood that the relationship between Domain X and Domain Y (more or less links) is the same for both the mobile- and desktop-based indexes? If the relationships tend to remain the same, then the impact on SERPs will be limited. We will call this relationship being "directionally consistent."
To accomplish this part of the study, I took a sample of domain pairs from the mobile index and compared their relationship (more or less links) to their performance in the desktop index. Did the first have more links than the second in both the mobile and desktop? Or did they perform differently?
It turns out that the indexes were fairly close in terms of directional consistency. That is to say that while the link graphs as a whole were quite different, when you compared one domain to another at random, they tended in both data sets to be directionally consistent. Approximately 88% of the domains compared maintained directional consistency via the indexes. This test was only run comparing the mobile index domains to the desktop index domains. Future research might explore the reverse relationship.
So what's next?: Moz and the mobile-first index
Our goal for the Moz link index has always been to be as much like Google as possible. It is with that in mind that our team is experimenting with a mobile-first index as well. Our new link index and Link Explorer in Beta seeks to be more than simply one of the largest link indexes on the web, but the most relevant and useful, and we believe part of that means shaping our index with methods similar to Google. We will keep you updated!
Hey folks, I want to reiterate something if I wasn't clear enough in my blog post. I present the worst case scenario of a mobile-only index vs a desktop-only index because we don't know how Google will effectively blend their crawls into a single index and so that webmasters can prepare for a worst-case scenario. It is certain that Google will maintain a single index (they have already announced this) and it is virtually certain that they will use one of the methods I mention above to mitigate against the competing versions of desktop and mobile sites. Thanks again for reading and I will try and respond to questions as soon as I can!
Great post, Russ. I've a couple of questions.
Firstly, do you think perhaps that this is a deliberate re-shaping of the linkgraph?
As you say, well placed links prevail, and if the original goal of a linkgraph was to approximate traffic, ditching desktop-only ones might be a useful step in that direction.
Secondly, what do you think will happen to SEO-motivated mega-menus and footer links? What's the new, mobile-first equivalent?
> Firstly, do you think perhaps that this is a deliberate re-shaping of the linkgraph?
I doubt. I think that Google pointed out to an interesting phenomena where featured snippets were attributed to sites that didn't have the same content on their mobile pages. I'm guessing there were several examples of issues where the desktop variant doesnt faithfully represent the mobile data. Google needed to fix that relative to the importance of mobile. Now, do I think they will benefit from the re-shaping - absolutely. From what I have seen, the pairing down of the link graph appears to be only positive in quality.
> SEO-motivated mega-menus and footer links? What's the new, mobile-first equivalent?
I have a sneaking suspicion that the link graph will be something like append-only relative to pages found in both. That is to say, if you find X links in mobile and Y links in desktop, they will trust all links X and Y and perhaps might give extra weight to those in both. This seems like the simplest implementation and would then not require any changes by SEOs or webmasters. They can continue to create mostly-parallel sites that are modified at render to look nice on each viewport.
Interesting answers, thanks!
You give me hope. Sites that launched in the late 1990s with 10,000 backlinks are tough to beat on desktop for newer sites when it comes to link quantity.
But mobile first changes the equation. I may not lose as many backlinks as the other guy because I have fewer to lose. So I will try to make up the difference with mobile quality rather than backlink quantity.
I still see a surprising number of sites that either don't have a mobile version or have a bad one. I'll keep developing my modest mobile presence and keep chasing after do follow backlinks that are much harder to find in 2018 than they were in the 1990s.
It is great to remain positive, but remember that the study shows that 88% of the time mobile-first indexing doesn't impact the relationship between two different sites (that is to say, the site with the most links in the Desktop version also has it in the Mobile version). Keep creating great content and sharing it with the world, though. It is your best shot to perform great regardless of whether Mobile or Desktop dominates.
Gary Illyes has already clarified that for responsive websites everything will remain the same as it is exactly the same content for the mobile and desktop version. Only if you have a different mobile version then you may see differences in how your website is indexed and ranked in the SERPS.
Hi Russ
Thanks for this idea and theory.
Before I jump to more conclusions, can you please clarify/confirm I got this post right
1. You assume that Google would crawl the mobile versions of websites ("first") and therefore not "see" links from desktop variations, thereby not adding - or as it seems - even remove them from their link index similar to links being removed from pages?
2. Which Google announcement do you refer to here "Google's announcement to proceed with a mobile-first index". I assume you mean that age old thing that they would prefer the rendering of the mobile version over the desktop version. I am not aware of an announcement where they gave away some details on how they *crawl* (not render) a website when it comes to a specific behavior for the mobile version. Would love to read up on this.
3. You crawl a single site stripped down by 75% from some plugin right, or were there multiple sites analyzed?
4. Did you look at actual backlinks to your website, or are all the charts from those "stripped down mobile version"? It may misprint the picture a bit, because as you say the majority of external links remained where "in content" links. I am confused about that, can you clarify it please?
5. When you say you're experimenting with a mobile first index yourself at Moz, do you consider a behavior as I assume per 1. ?
Looking forward to your reply and clarification!
thanks so much
Christoph
Thanks for the questions!
> Google would crawl the mobile versions of websites
In this experimentation, yes. In reality, hell no. I listed off a handful of ways Google can/will mitigate this and I know from a conversation with a googler that at least 1 if not many others of these methods is being employed.
> they gave away some details on how they *crawl*
There are 3 announcements but I don't think any give away this info.
> or were there multiple sites analyzed
The first experiment was crawling with an initial set of 20,000 randomly selected websites from the Quantcast Top Million. The index ended up being several million URLs in size, IIRC, but I don't remember the total number of domains that the crawler ended up visiting. Once they started, they were not restricted to the initial 20,000 domains. This was to describe the general effect on the link graph. Then, in order to explain what was going on, I ran a deeper crawl on some example sites to better show how this happens. There were actually multiple experiments involved.
> as you say the majority of external links remained where "in content" link
The big crawl (which started with the 20K random domains) produced a large set of external links. I randomly selected a set of example links from the set where (1) the pages had a differing number of external links when comparing the Desktop and Mobile crawls and (2) this particular external link was on both the Desktop and Mobile crawls. The goal was to explore why certain links made it through both the Desktop and Mobile crawls while others did not. Because I didn't have time to use a real de-chroming solution, I just hand-checked around 100. I started to see the pattern that the links which seemed to stay in both Mobile and Desktop were in-content rather than sidebar or footer links. Finally, to confirm this, I selected some recent news-worthy sites and checked in Fresh Web Explorer to see if most of their recent links were unaffected by User Agent. Sure enough, the overwhelming majority of links were unaffected because the sites in question were receiving links from the actual stories and not some part of the page's "chrome" which often changes in mobile versions.
> When you say you're experimenting with a mobile first index yourself at Moz
We are looking which mitigation methods we want to employ. Once we figure that out, it is game on.
Thank you for the additional anwers Russ, very usefull indead! I had some similar doubts that have been answered by you in this commentary. Thanks a lot!
Hi Russ,
Thanks for the great analysis!
I must confess I am astonished. I have being noticing a difference for a while now, although never thought the extention is so big.
Your analysis is showing a clear path from now then, starting with better recommend new link strategies for the mobile first.
I see the future of mobile SEO as creating your website to be All-AMP. There are some great examples of such websites (especially big news outlets), and now with the introduction of AMP stories on mobile search they really nailed it.
What about link value? If desktop version have 20 links and mobile version 10 links (shared links, also found on desktop version), isn't that a signal to Google those 10 links are more important and thus—carry a higher value?
In a mobile-only crawl, you would definitely be right. But, we know that Google wont have a mobile-only crawl, in fact we know they will maintain a single index. My guess is that they will work out a way to not throw away links that only appear in desktop or only appear in mobile, but will rather count the aggregate of the two.
Apparently I did not best explain my point. But, from your reply to Tom Capper's comment, i can see you also suspect Google might give extra weight to link found in both mobile and desktop versions.
I know that is what I would do if I were google.
Firstly, Thanks for a great post. Yes, I absolutely agree with your answer that they will never neglect desktop version links but they are reshaping the phenomena of building rankings while doing aggregate method for both of these. It would make life tough for current marketers.
We have verified that the searches of our clients have been in the last months of 70% in mobiles and 30% computers. In the future computer searches will be residual, so web optimization is essential if you want to position yourself well in networks.
Very interesting publication.
Thanks for this information Russ.
Kind Regards
I agree.
And who can tell what'll happen if that number goes to 90% mobile search, and 10% desktop search.
Then webmasters will really need to optimize for mobile, because, perhaps, that is all that will be left.
Who really knows.
But it's best to be prepared.
Nice catch, Russ! While this part is no surprise, I find it noteworthy that in-content links seemed to survive the cull more often than others. We've all known these tend to be more meaningful, but there's another reason for leaning more toward in-content linking... a concept that many seem to shun. Thanks for the great info.
I fail to see how mobile first indexing is going to "disrupt" Google's link graph. Your article seems to confuse what is rendered in the browser once CSS and JavaScript have been applied to the underlying HTML with what actually exists in the HTML document.
There is a HUGE reason that Google has been telling webmasters for over a half decade now that they need to stop using m./.mobi subdomains/domains as well as adaptive design where your webserver returns different HTML depending on whether the client is mobile or desktop and that everyone should move to Responsive. With Responsive sites, the URLs for mobile are the same as the URLs for desktop. The entire HTML document that gets returned from the web server to the browser/crawler is identical for mobile and desktop.
You stated, "My personal blog drops 75 of the 87 links, and all of the external links, when the mobile version is accessed." If your site is Responsive, ALL 87 links and all external links exist in the HTML documents for BOTH the mobile and desktop versions of the page because the HTML is exactly the same. Only when that document gets rendered by the client, media queries are evaluated in the HTML or CSS. If it is determined the browser/crawler is mobile, then the CSS and JavaScript hide certain content and links from view of the user as well as move some things around on the page. BUT THEY ARE STILL IN THE HTML DOCUMENT.
Now, if you are using Adaptive design where the web server first determines if a browser/crawler is mobile or desktop and then renders totally different HTML for mobile than it does for desktop, then you might have a problem. If you're using m. or .mobi subdomains/domains and the HTML on your desktop site is totally different from that of the m. or .mobi site, then you might have a problem. But Google has been telling us for over a half decade to move to responsive. They saw this coming. For those who didn't listen, shame on them.
Currently, mobile sites are ranked based on the content that is found in the desktop pages discovered by the desktop crawler. When Mobile-First Indexing is completely rolled out, all desktop sites will be ranked based on the content found by the mobile crawler. With Responsive sites, the mobile crawler will see EXACTLY the same content, links, etc. in the mobile HTML document as the desktop crawler sees in the desktop HTML because the HTML is identical. Google has already said it doesn't matter whether the content (or links) are visible when the document is displayed on mobile. ALL content and ALL links in the HTML (whether visible or hidden) will be used to populate their index and link graph, respectively.
So again, I fail to see the issue as long as mobile webmasters have followed the direction of Google since Responsive was invented and moved to a responsive sites. Same HTML and same URLs for mobile and desktop mean no problems for your rankings. Sites that are still using m. and .mobi sites or Adaptive design will now have their URLs ranked based on ONLY the mobile HTML. This is only a tiny percent of the web as most have moved to Responsive. Sites that are linked to by m., .mobi, and Adaptive sites through their external links might not get credit if those links don't exist in the mobile version of the HTML. But since the vast majority of the mobile web is now Responsive, all sites should get credit for all inbound links except possibly those coming from m., .mobi, and Adaptive sites which are actually hiding their outbound external links.
I wouldn't call that disruptive at all. It will hardly be a blip on their radar. And if you think that Google's Engineers with all of their thousands and thousands of PhDs didn't consider all of this for a VERY long time before perfecting the mobile crawler and pulling the trigger on Mobile-First Indexing, you might want to think again.
This is key to all of us! I didn't know about these differences in link profile mobile x desktop! I will pay more attention to it in the future
4 months in we can honestly say that mobile first indexing is in full swing.
#1 metric that seems to have the biggest impact on rankings is page loading time. Keep that in mind.
Hi there!
Very interesting. I just saw it and I had not raised this issue. Thanks for making me think about it.
Thanks once again for the informative post Russ.
Very interesting post, with a lot of information. It is clear that the phone is winning in front of a desk, although in our case, I think it depends on the sector. Since we have 53% of mobile phone and 45% of destktop, very equal. That if last year was mobile 41% and desktop 56%, so evidently more and more the use of mobile and having to adapt to it. We last year launched the mobile web, so this also influences insurance.
Thank you for the information Russ
Best regards!!
Hi Russ, great data and insight. I honestly haven't even weighed the fact yet that mobile displays less links. Less everything. Obviously that much is true and put into solid terms here.
My question (and forgive me if I missed this in your post or elsewhere) -- are we sure that this is how Google now defines its understanding of document relationships? Everything about "mobile first" (in general) squares with the "if I were Google" card of 10 years ago. I'm tempted to play it again here. Google already has a deeper understanding of links from non-mobile crawling. Would they intentionally back-peddle to an inferior data set when calculating link metrics?
If I were Google, I sure wouldn't.
Mobile-first, sure. But it's not mobile-only. Their decisions haven't always made sense before and they're usually at least 10 years behind what I give them credit for. Maybe they are here, again. Or maybe this is still out of all of our purview until somebody does the obvious and runs a simple experiment to prove it. I'll trust that more than another John Mueller Hangout that contradicts another Matt Cutts YouTube that contradicts an Inside Search post. :)
Hi Ross, This article was very nice to see, how the mobile website should be made.
I have some questions here.
1. My own website is exclusively focused on SEO and after a few days we are not able to specifically optimize traffic on mobile spaces. We can run multiple searches through the desktop version, but when customers search mobile at the same time, the same site can not see what you think.
2. We have done many backlinks to linking different sites, encouraged us to send comments and even share social media with shared links and share them with others (we keep in mind what is very special about the audience) but we need more business than support and Developer does not help to create and is not able to innovate, what are the steps to take care of?
Let me know how and how you can take additional steps to improve the overall mobile experience of customers.
[Links removed by editor.]
HI Ross, It was indeed a great pleasure to see this article which depicts about how mobile websites should be created.
I have few questions over here.
1. I have a website of my own focusing only on SEO and since few days we are not able to optimize the traffic specially in the mobile space. We are able to get multiple queries from desktop version but the customers are not able to see the same site when searched on mobile, also what do you think?
2.We have done lot of back linking to the various sites, including guest commenting sending reciprocal links and even sharing in social media and encouraged to share it with others,(we are very particular about the audience which we keep in mind) But the backing is not helping us generate much business as required and the developers and not able to innovate on this, what are the steps to be taken care of?
Let me know about how and what additional steps should I take in order to enhance the overall mobile experience to the customer.
It's high time for web developers to take mobile first development seriously and not to cut corners.
You are right significance of mobile based website has increased but it has also raised many questions in the minds of the SEO community about the future of how websites would rank in the near future, if mobile remains the top priority but this truth is inevitable that future is mobile and the one who keep their-selves fully updated with most modern mobile first practices, would eventually win over their competitors. Android is owned by Google and desktop is owned by Microsoft so one can predict what is the future. To read more on importance of responsive websites read.
"Importance of Responsive Website Designs for Businesses"