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
-
How do you handle a site with inherited negative links, but no penalty?
I'm trying to rank a new client for various key phrases that contain "it support." The problem is that about 100 of their 180 total referring domains have links that include "it support" (usually as partial match, or if exact then for uninteresting terms with low traffic), mostly on quite low quality directories. So, no penalty, and not much exact match I'm worried about, but I'm concerned that there's too high a percentage overall of partial match or simpy "it support"-based links for me to continue building keyword-optimized links to try and rank for the much harder terms we need to rank for... Despite the large number of low quality directories, a disavowal does not seem like a good idea since there is no penalty, but how does one avoid being handicapped by such bad links that came before one's time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Client wants to remove mobile URLs from their sitemap to avoid indexing issues. However this will require SEVERAL billing hours. Is having both mobile/desktop URLs in a sitemap really that detrimental to search indexing?
We had an enterprise client ask to remove mobile URLs from their sitemaps. For their website both desktop & mobile URLs are combined into one sitemap. Their website has a mobile template (not a responsive website) and is configured properly via Google's "separate URL" guidelines. Our client is referencing a statement made from John Mueller that having both mobile & desktop sitemaps can be problematic for indexing. Here is the article https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
We would be happy to remove the mobile URLs from their sitemap. However this will unfortunately take several billing hours for our development team to implement and QA. This will end up costing our client a great deal of money when the task is completed. Is it worth it to remove the mobile URLs from their main website to be in adherence to John Mueller's advice? We don't believe these extra mobile URLs are harming their search indexing. However we can't find any sources to explain otherwise. Any advice would be appreciated. Thx.0 -
Why my site not ranking
Hello everyone, can anyone suggest me, where i am having problem in my site www.suntechengineers.com, i know content is less,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojathakar
but any other things that i am missing in my site? Is There any on page query please let me know, i need urgently getting up this,please help thanx in advance0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
Is this Panda?
Hi, I have a page that has been fluctuating a lot the last few days, here are the results: 5/14: #17 (this is where it had been ranking for about 2 months). 5/15: #34 5/16: #33 5/18: #9 5/19: #35 5/20: #13 5/21: #37 I have only made minor changes to the page, and the link profile seems to look good. Here's the page: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/dui.html (targeted KW: San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI Attorney). The page has a lot of high-quality, original, and well-cited content. Any thoughts on what could be causing so much back and forth? I should state that none of the other rankings for this site (overall) have been impacted. Just this page for DUI related searches (San Diego DUI Lawyer, San Diego DUI attorney, San Diego Drunk Driving Lawyer, etc.).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Site Navigation
Hi Mozzers, I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav. Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are: 1. Category ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden 2. Subcat ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath 3. Family ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them. Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts? Thanks! -Zack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Noindex Mobile Site?
So I wanted to get everyone's opinion. Have a client in online retail on ASP and their developers built a mobile site a while back before we took the client on. For the sake of this post, just assume, resources are limited anddevelopers are not good (constantly break things we request to get fixed). They never installed analytics on the mobile site, so all I have to go off of is referral data on the main stores GA account for m.example.com However if I look to see what is indexed by doing site:m.example.com am not seeing many pages. The mobile site has a ton of internal links in GWT and am questioning its negative impact as there are no canonicals, no mobile sitemap present. In the ideal world, I would implement proper Mobile SEO practices but given the resources of no dev budget and devs not being good, I was thinking about noindexing the mobile site since I can RDP into the site and access robots. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sean_Dawes0 -
Redirect micro-niche site to bigger niche site?
I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain. To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!) Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided? Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0