Mobile Site Panda 4.2 Penalty
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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