Why is the number of mobile-friendly pages on Google Search Console Mobile Usability report less than the number of pages indexed? [closed]

Question

The Mobile Usability report for one of the websites I maintain is currently showing 215 Valid (mobile-friendly pages). At the same time, the Coverage report shows that a total of 399 pages are Valid (have been indexed).

I downloaded a list of all the URLs that have been indexed and a list of all URLs that are currently considered mobile-friendly pages. Then I compared the two lists and started checking several of the URLs that are indexed but not shown as mobile-friendly using the URL Inspection tool.

The URL Inspection results for all of the URLs that I have checked show the page as mobile-friendly. An example is shown below:

The Mobile Usability report shows 5 URLs with Errors, so I have information about 220 of the total number of indexed URLS.

I would like to understand what does it mean that there are some URLs that are currently indexed, but are not considered mobile-friendly nor have important mobile usability issues.

Additional info:

• Two months ago (around November 15), the number of mobile-friendly pages had increased to 248 with no pages showing Errors. That number started to decrease until it reached the current value, but a corresponding number of errors wasn't reported.

  It is like some pages were simply removed from the Mobile Usability report, but for no explicit reason.

  The number of indexed pages increased by 1 during that same period of time.

• There was a Google Search Update on November 25 indicating that some reports will show data primarily from mobile-first indexing. Unfortunately is still not clear to me why indexed pages > ( mobile-friendly pages + pages with mobile issues).

  Is it incorrect to expect errors to show for all indexed URLs that are not considered mobile-friendly?

Thank you for taking the time to review this question.

Rusel

I'm seeing the same behavior and have not been able to figure it out. Would love to hear any analysis of why and how to resolve! – Beltz

@Willington Vega I have a question related to mobile usability report, can you please tell me how much time google takes to report. I have added my website in google search console 7 days ago but still Google is saying "Processing data, please check again in a few days". – Hygro

Answer 1

Same problem here across multiple sites. Zero errors yet initially a rise in pages then a decrease to current levels which represents roughly half my total indexed pages. I have spent many days researching and trying a variety of tests to see if I could figure it out. All to no avail. I have changed internal links, menus, footers, sitemaps, removed javascript etc... None of the data showed any changes related to anything I have done nor is there any correlation between websites. The only thing I can see is that they seem to be prioritizing roughly according to page value (amount of internal links and proximity of links to home page), as menu items and linked pages from home page do get represented more, but I could not trigger any changes by playing with those factors. I am not seeing any mobile SERP issues related to it so I have temporarily given up.

In the end, I can only reason that Google is prioritizing getting everyone on mobile first so they are only allocating resources (caching, indexing, crawling budget) to what it deems are important pages on each website until they finish mobile first indexing all websites.

I have also been searching for others with the same problem but you are the first that I have found that has posted about it.

Dong

I think you are right. My client found a recording of a Google Hangout (youtu.be/ZKN8B3yeFAQ?t=41m11s) with John Mueller where he said that "The Mobile Usability report and Structured Data reports in Search Console are based on a significant sample of the pages on your site and aren’t meant to be a comprehensive list". – Rusel

It seems we shouldn't expect to see all indexed URLs on the results from those reports. As long as all the URLs included are marked as Valid we don't need to worry. – Rusel

@Willington Vega. Thanks for this. We have been wondering about this for a few years thinking this is some sort of issue. – Vivianviviana