Lost Rankings Late April Even Though We Have A Mobile Site
-
I have noticed a significant drop in rankings since late April. It is about a 30% drop in organic from Google.
This is despite the fact that we launched a mobile site before the update. What gives?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
-
If it is a drop in organic desktop traffic, then that won't be caused by the mobile change (as Andy said). Out of curiosity, what are your percentages of organic traffic by device? Does mobile account for a sizable amount of your organic traffic? I'm wondering if mobile is being mis-reported as desktop?
While I'm doubtful that mobile usability issues would cause a drop in desktop traffic (assuming it is legitimately desktop traffic not being mis-reported), one easy way to test this would be to take a page that get lots of organic traffic that has mobile usability issues reported, fix those mobile usability issues. This ranking factor is real time and page by page (see Search Engine Land), so you should see some results quickly if that is the factor.
Another question for you - what exactly did you change about your product descriptions? Meta description, on-page text, both? Are those the pages that lost traffic? Maybe try reverting back and see what impact that has.
I'm guessing you don't want to share your domain here, but feel free to connect with me privately with the website URL and I'd be happy to take a look at your domain more specifically to see if I can spot anything else that might be causing this issue.
-
Hi There,
The drop in traffic was for desktop organic.We do have a mobile site.
In WMT, I see 365 errors under mobile usability (viewport, font size, elements too close). We have over 100K pages.
The traffic we get is for long-tail keywords. Most of which we are not tracking because the volume for each keyword would be so low. It seems too much of a coincidence that all of our competitors would move up at once for the same terms, causing a drop in our traffic.
The last actions we took as far as link building was about 4 months ago:
-
It was removing some links with exact match anchor text via outreach
-
Added a couple of links via broken link building method
We also added some product descriptions.
Other than that we haven't really done much on the site. The traffic drop was around the same time the mobile algo update rolled out.
Thanks for your help.
-
-
Hi There,
The drop in traffic was for desktop organic.
We have never had a manual penalty. The last actions we took as far as link building was about 4 months ago:
-
It was removing some links with exact match anchor text via outreach
-
Uploaded a disavow file with a number of links
-
Added a couple of links via broken link building method
We also added some product descriptions.
Other than that we haven't really done much on the site. The traffic drop was around the same time the mobile algo update rolled out.
Thanks for your help.
-
-
Hi there, and thanks for your question! Did you see Hector and Matthew's responses? We'd love to help you sort this issue out. But first, we need some details. Please let us know if you are able to answer Hector and Matthew's questions or not. Thanks!
Christy
-
Sorry to hear about the drop in traffic. Like Hector said, it is really tough to know what caused the drop without more information. A few questions to clarify on this...
-
Like Andy said, are you referring to mobile organic traffic or overall organic traffic? What is the decrease in organic traffic per device (desktop, tablet, mobile)?
-
Let's go with it maybe having something to do with Google's mobile changes. Do you pass Google's mobile friendly test? I have seen a number of sites that had mobile sites, but they didn't fully pass Google's criteria. Do you see any errors listed in Google Search Console (Search Traffic -> Mobile Usability)?
-
If it isn't something with mobile, what other changes have you made to your site lately? Removed any pages? Removed any redirects? Blocked pages from Google's crawlers due to a code upgrade? Have you run a crawl test on your site - it can sometimes be the most basic of things that happened accidentally. Have you also checked for errors in Search Console?
-
Looking outside of your site, have any of your competitors made changes and/or gained rankings? Maybe the decrease in traffic doesn't have anything to do with you, just a competitor moving up quickly. I'd check the rankings report in Moz as well as the Search Analytics report in Google Search Console to see if you notice any changes.
Hope those questions give you some help in figuring out what is up.
-
-
This is despite the fact that we launched a mobile site before the update. What gives?
The mobile algorithm would have nothing to do with desktop results, unless you are referring to mobile SERPs?
-Andy
-
There are a lot of factors which could have caused this. Without a background of your last actions, links, changes... or at least the domain name, it is impossible to give any valid answer.
Too generic question, sorry
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Responsive Site has "Not Found" Errors for mobile/ and m/ in Google Search Console
We have recently launched a new responsive website for a client and have noticed 2 "Not Found" errors within Google Search Console for /mobile and /m Both these URLs are not linked from anywhere within the site. However Google is reporting them as being linked from the homepage. This is not the first site we have seen in which Google has reported this error, however the other site was not a mobile friendly site. My thoughts are to 301 them back to the Homepage. Anybody else have any thoughts on this? or have recently received the same errors?
Web Design | | JustinTaylor881 -
Site structure and Visual Sitemaps
Aside from mind mapping software are there any tools ( recommended) to build a visual sitemap of the internal linking structure of a URL? I've been trying to 'show' clients the structure of a website as it pertains to internal and external links. Here is one I've tried it's "Close" - http://site-visualizer.com/ . I've been using the excel export function, import into mind meister and building it. It's a teeny bit time consuming for large websites. Site structure I feel is a valuable portion of SEO and a down and dirty visual explanation would be great. Don't get me wrong, it offers other benefits as well- it's just I'd like to free up the time it takes. Thank you in advance. Screen shots are available on the website of the organization.
Web Design | | TammyWood0 -
Show new mobile site to 60% users & old mobile site to 40% users
Hi, We are planning to show new mobile site to 60% users & old mobile site to 40% users. We will show the old site to google crawler. Our old site has some interlinking through footer & content whereas the new site does not has it. We wanted to do this since our new site does not supports some browsers. Will there be an issue with Google on showing the site like this. The mobile site & desktop site will have same url across devices & browsers. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Web Hosting and CDN for Wordpress Site Load Speed - Suggestions Needed
We all know that website load speed is more important than ever. While I love the look and feel of parallax and Wordpress, I want to do everything I can to keep the load speed down. I see a lot of conflicting information regarding web hosting services, CDN services and other service (Cloudflare for example). I am looking to hear from those with their own experiences to let me know what they think is the ideal setup for a parallax Wordpress site is as far as which services to use, including: 1. Web Hosting
Web Design | | Gauge123
2. CDN
3. Any other service or product that would help to provide and extremely fast site load time. Thank you!0 -
SEO Audit for site redesign
I'm in the process of preparing my company's ecommerce site for a redesign - largely to move to a responsive design and improve issues with UI and some much-needed features. This is a very small ecommerce business (Less than $300K annually), and we have settled on Magento Community Edition for our platform. We understand it to be very "SEO" friendly, and its similar to our current platform - it gives us a lot of flexibility in design, and it appears scalable. While I am aware of our current sites shortcomings (from an SEO standpoint), I was wondering if I should employ an SEO person/company to do a pre/post redesign audit. I looked at the MOZ checklist, and ran my site through Hubspot and WooRanks free tools, and am aware of what they are reporting as SEO items to be fixed. As I am so small, I was wondering if an SEO audit in addition to what I already know might be overkill? Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome.
Web Design | | Artfx1 -
How to add SEO Content to this site
Hi Great community and hope you guys can help! I have just started on a SEO project for http://bit.ly/clientsite , the clients required initial KPI is Search Engine Rankings at a fairly low budget. The term I use for the site is a "blurb site", the content is thin and the initial strategy I want to employ to get the keyword rankings is to utilize content. The plan is to: add targeted, quality (user experience & useful) and SEO content on the page itself by adding a "read more" link/button to the "blurb" on the right of the page (see pink text in image) when someone clicks on the "read more", a box of content will slide out styled much the same as the blurb itself and appear next to and/or overlay over the blurb and most of the page (see pink rectangle in image) Question: Is this layer of targeted , quality (user experience & useful) and SEO content (which requires an extra click to get to it) going to get the same SEO power/value as if it were displayed traditionally on the initial display? If not, would it be better to create a second page (2<sup>nd</sup> layer) and have the read more link to that and then rel-canonical the blurb to that 2<sup>nd</sup> page, so that all the SEO passes to this expanded content and the second page/layer is what will show up in the rankings? Thanks in advance qvDgZNE
Web Design | | Torean0 -
Ranking for competitive keywords
Hi Folks, I am relatively new to SEO and I was hoping folks here could give me some guidance/tips on ranking in a competitive keyword space. My client is a health care provider and they wish to rank for terms like 'heart attack' which I believe will be quite difficult due to it being a short tail keyword and it is a very competitive space. Any an all advice and input is greatly appreciated. Regards, Dave
Web Design | | icanseeu0 -
Are tables OK in e-commerce sites?
I know that for best results with search engines, tables should not be used. However as I look to redesign our older e-commerce site, I find that not only our website but many other e-commerce sites use tables. Is it acceptable to use tables in e-commerce or am I just viewing outdated e-commerce sites. Could you recommend a good shopping cart solution? We currently use volusion. Thanks for your time and see you in Boston next week!
Web Design | | Lael0