What it means in practice#
Googlebot crawls mostly as a smartphone. Whatever your mobile page contains — text, links, images, structured data, meta tags — is what Google indexes. Content that exists only on desktop is effectively invisible.
Checklist#
- Same main content on mobile and desktop. Content inside tabs or accordions is fine as long as it’s in the HTML.
- Same headings and internal links — don’t drop navigation or related links on mobile.
- Same structured data and meta robots tags on both versions.
- Images with alt text and crawlable URLs on mobile; don’t lazy-load them in ways that need user interaction.
- Responsive design with
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">is the simplest approach. - Performance on real mobile connections — see Core Web Vitals.
Separate mobile sites (m.example.com)#
Still supported but harder to maintain: you need equivalent content, bidirectional rel="alternate"/rel="canonical" annotations and correct redirects. Migrating to a responsive design is usually the better long-term choice.
Related: Googlebot, responsive design guide, meta viewport.