Google’s mobile-first indexing deadline is no longer a deadline and it decided to leave the “timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing,” John Mueller of Google said on the company blog. Previously, Google postponed the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021, and that deadline came and past.

No timeline. Now, Google said there is no specific timeline, instead Google said the search company “decided to leave the timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing.” Google added currently Google does not “have a specific final date for the move to mobile-first indexing.”

Why no deadline. Google said the deadline has been removed because after “analyzing the sites that are not yet indexed mobile-first” the company “determined that some of these sites are still not ready to be shifted over due to various, unexpected challenges that they’re facing.”

Google added that these “sites were facing unexpectedly difficult challenges and we wanted to accommodate their timelines.” Thus it was to be “thoughtful” of these sites and not move them over until they are ready.

Previously. Google in early March, before all the lock-downs began across most of the world, announced the deadline for all sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing would be September 2020. At that time, Google said, “To simplify, we’ll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020.”  Then in July 2020, Google moved that deadline once again to March 2021.

Sites will move. Google said as these sites make changes that enable them to switch over to mobile-first indexing, it will “gradually to move those remaining sites over.” Google said that if a website is not verified in Google Search Console, then Google won’t be able to inform it of a pending switch to mobile-first indexing. You can learn more about this in their blog post.

Why we care. Chances are, most, if not all, of your sites and the sites you manage have been moved to mobile-first indexing. If not, this means you have more time to worry about it.

If your site is not ready for the switch, I’d be concerned there are other issues with the overall platform that you may need to upgrade before it becomes a larger issue outside of just mobile-first indexing.

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With the iOS 15 release on September 20th, AMP URLs in Google Search just stopped working. Google is aware of the issue and said the issue should be resolved soon. This is only impacting Google searchers using Google Search on iOS devices that have been upgraded to iOS 15.

What happens. If you are on iOS 15 and you click on a website listing in the Google Search results, you will not be taken to an AMP URL, even if the AMP URL exists for that listing. Instead, you will likely be taken to the main site’s URL for that page, or a link to their mobile app – if you have the app pre-installed on your device.

Jeff Johnson, an iOS developer, dug into this and said with the iOS 15 Safari “User-Agent, there are no AMP links in Google search results, but if I simply change Version/15.0 to Version/14.0 and keep the rest the same, Google search results suddenly have AMP links again!” “This is reproducible on my iPhone, in the Xcode iPhone simulator, and also in desktop Safari Mac with its User-Agent spoofed as iPhone,” he added.

I added an example of what this looks like on my personal blog, if you want to see it in action.

Confirmed bug. Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed the bug on Twitter saying “It’s a bug specific to iOS 15 that we’re working on. We expect it will be resolved soon.”

Why we care. You might notice weirdness with your analytics data around your AMP URLs coming from Google Search over the past couple of weeks. Your traffic should not be impacted because the traffic is still going to your main URL, but traffic to your AMP URLs may have a decline due to this bug with iOS 15. It is still not yet resolved but it should be resolved soon.

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