Mobile first - what about content that you don't want to display on mobile?

[MSGroup]

ANOTHER mobile first question. Have searched the forum and didn't see something similar. Feel free to passive- aggressively link to an old thread.

TL;DR - Some content would just clutter the page on mobile but is worth having on desktop. Will this now be ignored on desktop searches?

Long form:

We have a few ecommerce websites. We're toying with the idea of placing a lot more text on our collection/category pages. Primarily to try and set the scene for our products and sell the company a bit more effectively. It's also, obviously, an opportunity to include a couple of long tail keywords.

Because mobile screens are small (duh) and easily cluttered, we're inclined _not _to display this content on mobile. In this case; will any SEO benefit be lost entirely, even to searchers on desktop?

Sorry if I've completely misunderstood mobile-first indexing! Just an in-house marketing manager trying to keep up! cries into keyboard

Thanks for your time.
Ross

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Mobile-first indexing means Google will predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page's content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query. Since the majority of users now access Google via a mobile device, the index will primarily use the mobile version of a page's content going forward. We aren't creating a separate mobile-first index. We continue to use only one index.

With mobile-first indexing, Googlebot primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent. We will continue to show the URL that is the most appropriate to users (whether it's a desktop or mobile URL) in Search results.

if your site has separate desktop and mobile content, which means you have a dynamic serving or separate URLs (or m-dot) site, make sure you follow the best practices below to prepare for mobile-first indexing:

• Your mobile site should contain the same content as your desktop site. If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, you should consider updating your mobile site so that its primary content is equivalent with your desktop site. This includes text, images (with alt-attributes), and videos in the usual crawlable and indexable formats.
• Structured data should be present on both versions of your site. Make sure URLs in the structured data on the mobile versions are updated to the mobile URLs. If you use Data Highlighter to provide structured data, regularly check the Data Highlighter dashboard for extraction errors.
• Metadata should be present on both versions of the site. Make sure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent across both versions of your site.

So in your case, you are trying to keep the paradigm of the desktop first cutting the content for mobile. Probably you are trying to fit a desktop site into a mobile and that's probably your main error. I had the same issue in the past. So the best way to deal with that is very simple, literally, you need to starts with a blank paper to design your site starting for the mobile version. And that means images, content, graphics, call to actions and so on

[bridget.randolph]

Roman has covered most of the bases with his answer, so I won't retread old ground! But one thing I will note - my understanding is that with mobile-first indexing, content which is default-collapsed (to minimize clutter) won't be discounted. So if there is content you want to have on the site but the long-form nature is making the mobile experience feel cluttered, consider including it in expandable accordion style sections or similar. I would not recommend leaving it out altogether as Googlebot may no longer crawl your desktop site at all and all that content you add to the desktop site only won't give you any benefit.