There are still a ton of them out there. Here's the good news: the mobile Googlebot will still see these pages! The mobile crawler does not just crawl “mobile-friendly” pages. He explores everything. These pages will still be viewable - they just won't get the "mobile friendly" designation - but that's perfectly acceptable as it has absolutely nothing to do with mobile-first indexing. Sure, they won't rank as highly as mobile-friendly sites, but they already aren't ranking as highly as mobile-friendly sites. This will not change after the first mobile indexing. Advertising Continue reading below So what will be affected? Basically, the only pages affected will be pages whose mobile version does not include the same content as the desktop version.
Again, it is important to note the “page level” here. If we look at our example above, we see that much of the content is a case hair masking service study. If this case study had a mobile version that didn't include all of the desktop page content, it would suffer from this change. IF, however, this case study ONLY had desktop pages - it would still rank! It would just look ugly on cell phones. This is an important distinction. And that's the distinction that I don't see a lot of SEOs making. I see many articles discussing the number of pages on both desktop and mobile sites of a site. Unless desktop pages that don't have mobile equivalents redirect everyone to the mobile homepage, this metric doesn't matter.
These pages will still be indexed. What we should be looking at is the content that is on the desktop page, but not the mobile version. Advertising Continue reading below Great, enough theory. Just tell me what to do. Sure no problem. Do. A. Reactive. Site. But what belongs on a subpage instead of about the difference between my mobile users and my desktop users? What if I want to adapt my mobile site to the fact that they search differently? A then maybe that content the homepage? It will take good information architecture, content strategy, and UX teamwork, but it's entirely possible to create a different mobile experience without losing content. You just have to think. Hey, nobody said SEO was easy, right? It's time to roll up our sleeves and go RMS.