Mobile Site Panda 4.2 Penalty
-
We are an ecommerce company, and we outsource our mobile site to a service, and our mobile site is m.ourdomain.com. We pass the Google mobile ready test.
Our product page content on the mobile site is woefully thin (typically less than 100 words), and it appears that we got hit with Panda 4.2 on the mobile site. Starting at the end of July, our mobile rankings have dropped, and our mobile traffic is now about half of what it was in July. We are working to correct the content issue but it obviously takes time.
So here's my question - if our mobile site got hit with Panda 4.2, could that have a negative effect on our desktop site?
-
My gut says that this is not a Panda hit. Any sites that I saw get hit with Panda in July were hit on exactly July 17th or 18th.
The decision to noindex (I'm assuming you meant noindex rather than nofollow?) product pages is one that would likely need some in depth investigation made in order to decide. But, in most cases I do not recommend noindexing products.
A drop from #1 to #3 does not sound typical of a Panda hit. That said, I have seen some Panda hit sites that start with a slight decline and continue to fall from there. But, again, my gut is saying this is not Panda. A drop from #1 to #3 could be a whole bunch of things and I'm guessing that having some thin product pages is not your main problem.
This sounds like a question that is probably a little too detailed to be answered in Q&A. Perhaps if you are able to provide the url you can get some better feedback, but otherwise you'll mostly be getting gut instincts and opinions.
-
Yep. We got hit around 7/22. We're an ecommerce site, and most of our 2000 products have little to no search value. We were focused on roughly 50 products. We took about a 20% hit on desktop and 35% on mobile. We had one high value (100K+ monthly searches) product ranked #1 that dropped to #3, and I wrote the traffic drop off to that. Digging in a little deeper, I realized that we got hit. The traffic dropped maybe 10%, but it's been a slow erosion ever since.
All but a handful of products have descriptions between 40-60 words. We are in the process of creating new content, but it's expensive.
Does it make sense to nofollow product pages that have no search value?
-
I can't say that I have heard of a case where just the mobile site was affected by Panda. As far as I know, Panda doesn't distinguish between mobile and desktop, but I could be wrong.
Did the drop happen at the end of July, or was it July 17/18? The latter is when Panda refreshed. Although it was a rolling refresh, we really didn't see much Panda action near the end of July.
My money would be on either some type of a technical issue surrounding the move to an m.dot site.
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
-
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Desktop vs. Mobile Results
When googling on www.google.ca for "wedding invitations" and in my own geo location market of Toronto, my site - www.stephita.com, will show up differently on SERP on desktop (Chrome & IE) vs. mobile (iPad, iPhone, android, etc.). On desktop SERP, I will show up 6/7 position... (which is relatively a new position, the past 3 weeks - I was previously on page 2) (After a bunch of SEO fixes, I've managed to propel my site back to page 1!) On mobile SERP, I only show up on 1/2 position on PAGE 2 😞 As I mentioned above, I did a bunch of SEO fixes that I think were related to Panda/Penguin algos. So I'm wondering why my MOBILE SERP has NOT improved along the way? What should I be looking at to fix this 5-6 position differential? Thanks all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TysonWong0 -
Why is this site not indexed by Google?
Hi all and thanks for your help in advance. I've been asked to take a look at a site, http://www.yourdairygold.ie as it currently does not appear for its brand name, Your Dairygold on Google Ireland even though it's been live for a few months now. I've checked all the usual issues such as robots.txt (doesn't have one) and the robots meta tag (doesn't have them). The even stranger thing is that the site does rank on Yahoo! and Bing. Google Webmaster Tools shows that Googlebot is crawling around 150 pages a day but the total number of pages indexed is zero. It does appear if you carry out a site: search on Google however. The site is very poorly optimised in terms of title tags, unnecessary redirects etc which I'm working on now but I wondered if you guys had any further insights. Thanks again for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iProspect-Ireland0 -
Troubled QA Platform - Site Map vs Site Structure
I'm running a Q&A forum that was built prioritizing UX over SEO. This decision has cause a bit of a headache as we're 6 months into the project with 2278 Q&A pages with extremely minimal traffic coming from search engines. The structure has the following hiccups: A. The category navigation from the main Q&A page is entirely javascript and only navigable by users. B. We identify Google bots and send them to another version of the Q&A platform w/o javascript. Category links don't exist in this google bot version of the main Q&A page. On this Google version of the main Q&A page, the Pinterest-like tiles displaying individual Q&As are capped at 10. This means that the only way google bot can identify link juice being passed down to individual QAs (after we've directed them to this page) is through 10 random Q&As. C. All 2278 of the QAs are currently indexed in search. They are just indexed very very poorly in SERPs. My personal assumption, is that Google can't pass link juice to any of the Q&As (poor SERP) but registers them from the site map so it gets included in Google's index. My dilemma has me struggling between two different decisions: 1. Update the navigation in the header to remove the javascript and fundamentally change the look and feel of the Q&A platform. This will allow Google bot to navigate through Expert category links to pass link juice to all Q&As. or 2. Update the redirected main Q&A page to include hard coded category links with 100s of hard coded Q&As under each category page. Make it similar, ugly, flat and efficient for the crawling bots. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I need to find a solution as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TQContent0 -
Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Hey guys, quick question I didn't find an answer to online. Scenario: 1. Site A links to Site B. It's a natural, regular, follow-link 2. Site A joins Site B's affiliate program, and adds an affiliate link Question: Does the first, regular follow link get devalued by the second affiliate link? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
This site got hit but why..?
I am currently looking at taking on a small project website which was recently hit but we are really at a loss as to why so I wanted to open this up to the floor and see if anyone else had some thoughts or theories to add. The site is Howtotradecommodities.co.uk and the site appeared to be hit by Penguin because sure enough it drops from several hundred visitors a day to less than 50. Nothing was changed about the website, and looking at the Analytics it bumbled along at a less than 50 visitors a day. On June 25th when Panda 3.8 hit, the site saw traffic increase to between 80-100 visitors a day and steadily increases almost to pre-penguin levels. On August 9th/10th, traffic drops off the face of the planet once again. This site has some amazing links http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/04/algorithmsdata-vs-analystsreports-fight/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesAgate
http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/using/help/business/researchingfinance/stockmarket/ That were earned entirely naturally/editorially. I know these aren't "get out of jail free cards" but the rest of the profile isn't that bad either. Normally you can look at a link profile and say "Yep, this link and that link are a bit questionable" but beyond some slightly off-topic guest blogging done a while back before I was looking to get involved in the project there really isn't anything all that fruity about the links in my opinion. I know that the site design needs some work but the content is of a high standard and it covers its topic (commodities) in a very comprehensive and authoritative way. In my opinion, (I'm not biased yet because it isn't my site) this site genuinely deserves to rank. As far as I know, this site has received no unnatural link warnings. I am hoping this is just a case of us having looked at this for too long and it will be a couple of obvious/glaring fixes to someone with a fresh pair of eyes. Does anyone have any insights into what the solution might be? [UPDATE] after responses from a few folks I decided to update the thread with progress I made on investigating the situation. After plugging the domain into Open Site Explorer I can see quite a few links that didn't show up in Link Research Tools (which is odd as I thought LRT was powered by mozscape but anyway... shows the need for multiple tools). It does seem like someone in the past has been a little trigger happy with building links to some of the inner pages.0 -
Mobile Sitemap
Do I need to submit a sitemap for a mobile site? What are the benefits/disadvantages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Panda 2.5
I'm sure we have all read about the latest round of Google's algorithm changes also known as the "Panda 2.5" updates. This latest update seems to have hit some pretty large press release sites including PR Newswire and Businesswire (both of these have a great page rank and domain authority making them a great tool for SEO's in regards to inbounds links). Ultimately this update has directly affected their sites traffic, keyword rankings, and the number of indexed pages in Google. But what will this do to our smaller sites that benefit from these great links? Will these panda updates continue to target these content farms and lower their domain authority? Will that extrapolate out and effect the domain authority of our sites? What are your thoughts for those of us that utilize these services, should we re-evaluate our process? I look forward to a great discussion. Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0