Leading up to the mobile-first index, Google has some advice

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We all know the Google mobile-first index is coming soon, probably in the next few months or so. To prepare, it seems Google is encouraging webmasters to go responsive with their websites.

Google has just published a how-to on moving your m-dot site to responsive. The techniques are pretty basic, but it is an excellent reminder that while Google supports many mobile implementations, they do recommend responsive. In fact, Google has recommended that if you are switching to responsive, do it before the mobile first rollout.

Here are the steps Google wrote to move from m-dot to responsive:

1. Get your responsive site ready.
2. Configure 301 redirects on the old mobile URLs to point to the responsive versions (the new pages). These redirects need to be done on a per-URL basis, individually from each mobile URL to the responsive URL.
3. Remove any mobile-URL specific configuration your site might have, such as conditional redirects or a Vary HTTP header.
4. As a good practice, set up rel=canonical on the responsive URLs pointing to themselves (self-referential canonicals).