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
-
Ranking
Our new website has been live since April - it's an old domain but we've had a new website built on Magento 2, however, it's not ranking for most of our main keywords. Can anyone offer any advice?
Web Design | | RayflexGroup0 -
Conversion drop after site move
Have just migrated current and active site to Magento 1.9 and a new hosting package (dedicated and reasonably powerful for what we need). But we seem to have had a drop in conversion rate. I don't really know whether it's anything to be concerned about the moment. I've set up extensive server level 301 redirects for old pages. Would be glad of any thoughts? Thanks you
Web Design | | seoman100 -
Does having too many wordpress portfolio pages with little content hurt a site's SEO?
I have a site that is for a service company, not image based like a photographer or artist. We utilize the Portfolio feature to create a gallery of floor coating finishes (images of all the flooring finish options available) but this solution has created /portfolio/file-name pages for each image. These pages have no other content besides the image. I've run SEMrush audits on this site which shows a high percentage of pages with low text/code ratio and duplicate content (a lot of the finishes have very similar names). This site has been extremely slow to improve any visibility online (more than 9 months) and I'm wondering if this is a factor by possibly having a negative effect on our site. We initially chose the portfolio option because it was the best-looking solution for our users but we can certainly change it to another format if that is better. Thanks!
Web Design | | WillGMG0 -
New Re-design will my website rankings drop?
Hi guys, I have had to re-design my site although we are only 4 months into the seo game we have seen some good progress with our rankings. My question is there anything I need to consider before implementing the new designs so it doesn't effect my current rankings or any of our SEO work. Our current designs are content thing and so we have had to create more content to better optimize our site, however if doing so will this loose our current ranking position? Apperciate any advice around this Thanks
Web Design | | edward-may0 -
HELP! IE secure page display issue on new live site
For some reason IE 7, 8, & 9 do not display the following page: https://www.jwsuretybonds.com/protools.htm All they show is the Norton seal. It shows properly in all other browsers without issue (including IE 10+), but the earlier versions flash the page for a split second, then hides everything. Can someone shed some light on this? This is a new live site we just launched minutes ago and these browsers account for 12% of our overall traffic. UGH I hate you microsoft!!! Thanks all 🙂
Web Design | | TheDude0 -
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Hey on some of my report cards its saying im not using rel canonical correctly how do i change this on my site?
on some of my report cards its saying certain things featured on my services page are actually linking to my blog or something. and its saying im not using rel canonical correctly. can you help me out?
Web Design | | ClearVisionDesign0 -
Mobile Sitemap for Site with Media Queries
I'm doing SEO for a site. It uses Media Queries and the CSS to automatically resize the site for the screen size in use. I.e. the site detects the screen size of say an iPhone and the CSS knows which elements to hide for that screen size and still make it look good. This is great because it will automatically cut down the content to display nicely on small screens - obviating the need for a separate mobile site. What kind of sitemap should be generated since the urls are for desktop and mobile use? Yoast (sweet SEO) said it should have both regular and mobile style sitemap to get both the regular and mobile bots to visit, but didn't elaborate on how that sitemap should look. Do you have a recommendation for how exactly the sitemap should look? Should the sitemap have the urls all twice, i.e. once regular and once with the mobile indicator?
Web Design | | GregoryHaze1