Gary Illyes from Google spoke at SMX West yesterday about the upcoming mobile first index that is currently being tested.  One thing he said is that they are aiming for a “Quality Neutral” launch.

What does “Quality Neutral” mean?  It means Google doesn’t plan to launch it until they feel the search results will not be negatively impacted by the change to the mobile first index.  Instead, they want to ensure that the results are the same quality as the desktop results, or potentially better, before they want to launch it.

There are many reasons why switching to a mobile first index is a bit trickier.  For example, people don’t link as openly on the mobile web as they do on the desktop web, menaing there is the potential loss for some ranking signals.  Some sites pull their schema from the mobile version in order to reduce the page load time.  And some m. sites are merely shells of what is available on desktop – either in terms of pages or content, and those sites could be severely impacted by the switch.

For more on the upcoming changes, please see our Google Mobile First Index Guide.