San Francisco, Dec 20 (IANS): Google has said that its algorithms now use mobile-first indexing for over half of the pages shown in search results globally.

Google introduced mobile-first indexing about two years ago as it found that an increasing number of people were searching on Google using a smartphone.

This marked an important shift in its indexing as Google's ranking systems earlier typically looked at the desktop version of a page's content to evaluate its relevance to the user.

But with most people using mobile devices to search Google, the company announced that its algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site's content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in its results.

"In general, we move sites to mobile-first indexing when our tests assure us that they're ready," John Mueller of Google Switzerland wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

"When we move sites over, we notify the site owner through a message in Search Console," Mueller added.

Google said it was looking forward to being able to index more and more of the web using mobile-first indexing in order to help more users to search the web using a smartphone.