It sounds like it may be a misattribution issue rather than an actual traffic loss. This article seems like it could provide a (partial) answer. Do the dates you saw the drop align with the dates mentioned in the article?
Best posts made by bridget.randolph
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RE: Drop in Android organic search
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RE: Should we include a canonical or noindex on our m. (mobile) pages?
Hi Michelle,
You should use the 'switchboard tags', the special mobile canonical tag, when you have a mobile page which is a (duplicate) 'mobile version' of a desktop page.
This allows your mobile version to display in mobile search results, and your desktop version to display in desktop search results. It also indicates to Google that the mobile version is a duplicate version designed for mobile devices, rather than being simply duplicate content.
If you have a noindexed desktop page, and don't want the mobile version indexed either, you shouldn't need the canonical, just treat the mobile version the same as you would the desktop version.
If you have mobile-only content, with no corresponding desktop version, you can treat it the same as any other page; you don't need to add a canonical.
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RE: AMP pages - should we be creating AMP versions of all site pages?
Hi,
This is a good question; for now my answer would be no, I wouldn't bother with rolling it out to non-news pages at the moment. Right now it's only for news/article pages, and if you do have any of that content on your site, it would certainly be worth rolling it out to those, but we don't know how it will play out.
Although it is likely that we could see it roll out further in the near future, for now I think you're best off simply improving other areas (including mobile-related things like mobile-friendliness of the UX and site speed) until we see what direction Google ends up taking this in.
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RE: Is there an advantage to using rel=canonical rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?
Hi Jennifer,
You should definitely index the mobile site. As long as you correctly implement the mobile switchboard tags (which are basically a mobile-specific version of the standard rel=canonical/rel=alternate approach) this will not lead to duplication but rather to the correct version of the page showing up for mobile searches.
There is some discussion around whether or not Google currently has a separate index for mobile search (in any case they are likely to in future if they don't currently) but they definitely have a separate mobile crawler, which spoofs an iPhone user-agent. If you noindex all the mobile pages and redirect mobile user-agents to mobile versions of your pages, what the mobile crawler will see is your whole site as noindexed.
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RE: AMP - The what, why and how of it
Hi Ruchy, I've answered your questions below:
- Risks involved:
Most obvious is that you're duplicating your pages and therefore you'll need to make sure you correctly indicate that these are AMP versions of your regular content. There is also a risk that because the page loads in the search result, you'll see less traffic directly to your site - but usually (at least for publishers) this is worth it nonetheless because the impressions are higher (due to being featured in the news carousel at the top of the SERP).
- the best ways to implement it:
Depends on your existing setup. If you have a custom CMS, get your dev team to build it into the next iteration of the CMS. If you use Wordpress, you can use a WP plugin - Yoast has a good post about this: https://yoast.com/wordpress-amp-part-ii/
- why it is worth it:
It may not be. Definitely worthwhile for publishers or sites which publish content for Google News. For other types of site, I would recommend checking whether AMP is a common feature for your primary keywords, and decide accordingly. Also worth it if you're seeing a loss of general traffic and suspect it is due to AMP being more present in search. As James notes, it can help with pagespeed but that's not enough of a reason to do it.
- Are there any specific questions I should ask a potential developer, or information he should be aware of?
Has he/she done this before? Can they provide working examples? Do they understand how to make sure it's showing up as AMP rather than purely duplicate content? Are they familiar with what elements are supported and unsupported? Are they able to also implement relevant structured data markup?
- is there a way for it it be done for pages that have more than just text like quote forms, sliding headers etc.? Should we only do it for the blog section of our site?
You can add things like video, forms etc but bear in mind that the goal is to be as minimalist as possible, so any sort of fancy design element will likely not be supported. I would focus on implementing on news or other types of content which currently display AMP results in the SERP.
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RE: Mobile First Timeline - When Will Google Move The Remainder of Websites?
Great question! I love also that you're thinking about how to give support to your clients beyond just answering their literal question -- you're absolutely right that a lot of people are just feeling a bit of anxiety around being "not ready".
My typical response would be very similar to the points you've outlined, and I typically try to offer reassurance that this change isn't necessarily as drastic as it sounds as long as you already have a functional mobile-friendly version of your website. I suspect that part of the question comes from the issue of what Google views as "ready" to migrate versus what the webmaster might feel they need to do before they feel "ready". But as long as your mobile version is performing well and you have all the content accessible and user friendly, I don't think there's a lot to worry about.
I wrote a post for the Moz blog earlier this year to answer some of the FAQs people have about the shift to mobile-first indexing, you might find it helpful either for your own answer to this question or as a resource to share with people who ask you about it: https://moz.com/blog/mobile-first-indexing-seo
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RE: App indexing with several subdomains
As far as I am aware, the association file is just about which paths the app can handle - I think that if you register the root domain and handle all paths then it will handle all paths across all sub-domains (but you should test this).
When you are actually linking individual web pages to the universal page in the app, it uses a fully-qualified URL with protocol and subdomain so should work fine (see this documentation).
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RE: Web traffic in steady decline since launching responsive design in July
Hi Peter,
What was your process for shifting to responsive, was it a migration? As in, did you have a separate mobile version which you then redirected to the newly-responsive www. version? A different URL structure which changed with the redesign? or did you simply have a non-mobile-friendly design of your site previously and you redesigned it to be responsive but kept all the URLs the same etc? If there was a migration involved, you may be seeing an impact from that.
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RE: Have AMP pages on Chrome disappeared?
Hi Ingolfur,
Are you still having this issue? I'm seeing AMP results when I search with a US IP on Google US and Google UK, but not seeing any AMP results in Google IS. I checked with both Chrome and Safari and saw the same thing though.
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RE: Is it worth changing themes to be Responsive, and risk a SERP change?
Hi bizzer,
Everyone should ideally have a mobile-friendly website, because the percentage of people accessing your site on mobile devices will only continue to increase. And if you already have a Wordpress site, switching to a responsive theme is a great way to achieve that. But...as you note, there are other considerations, such as potentially lost rankings.
Only you know how much of a drop you can afford. It's a short-term sacrifice for long-term results.
Generally speaking, my recommendation would always be that if you can possibly do it, you should. And Miki and Moosa made some good suggestions above for how to minimise the negative impact somewhat. Combined with good technical SEO going into the new source code, you should hopefully be able to regain your position fairly quickly.
To answer your follow-up question: we don't know for sure, but it seems likely that having a mobile-friendly website could be a quality factor, whether now or later. Google have certainly discussed best practice guidelines for mobile, which seems to indicate that a good mobile experience is something which they care about. Apart from anything else, ~60% of mobile users will bounce if they land on a non-mobile-friendly site and go to a competitor, so that in itself will send a negative signal if you have a significant amount of mobile traffic. (and 15-20% isn't too shabby - even if some of that is tablet traffic, a responsive design will provide a better experience for them as well).
Hope that helps!
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RE: AMP vs Responsive Design? Mobile SEO
Hi Niall,
AMP is not the same as responsive design. It is a different format for mobile content which removes even more of the "extraneous" stuff in favor of a streamlined, simple design which Google then caches and displays from within a search result page (without the user ever needing to go to your website to view the content). The primary use case is for publishers to streamline their articles and other content, but AMP can also be used for other types of page (including ecommerce, although this is a newer development).
The pros of AMP include: faster load times, getting your content featured in article carousels, and potentially ranking benefit;
The cons of AMP include: creating separate versions of your mobile pages, removing certain elements to streamline the content, and the potential loss of traffic actually landing on your website.
Eric Enge has just put out a blog post here on the Moz blog all about this topic: https://moz.com/blog/amp-digital-marketing-2018
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RE: Have AMP pages on Chrome disappeared?
Great, glad to hear it's working now!
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RE: Desktop & Mobile Sitemaps Covering The Same Ground - Any Benefit To Having Both?
Hi John,
When you say that the URLs have the same structure: do you mean that they are different URLs but organised the same way (e.g. www.domain.com is the same as m.domain.com, www.domain.com/page-1 is the sames as m.domain.com/page-1, etc)? Or is it a responsive site with the same URLs regardless of device?
The primary benefit of a sitemap is for discovery by the search engine crawlers. If you have a responsive site, you don't need a separate mobile sitemap. If you have a different set of URLs for mobile devices, even if it follows the same structure as the desktop site, I'd recommend creating a mobile sitemap.
Hope that helps!
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RE: With Google's new Speed Update, what does that mean for AMP pages?
Hi Taylor, great question! I think the first thing to remember is that AMP is something you want to implement alongside a mobile-friendly website, not as a replacement.
AMP pages by nature are faster than the typical webpage and so they should not be affected by this, according to Google's statement: "The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries." They also note that query intent is a very strong signal and so in theory a very slow but very relevant page could still outrank a faster, less relevant result.
My take on this update is that it is a sign of Google starting to focus on making the shift to mobile-first indexing. If you want more info on that, I wrote a blog post here on Moz about it recently: moz.com/blog/mobile-first-indexing-seo
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RE: By Using interstitial (popups) on the webiste, will google penalize ranks for desktop and mobile both ?
It seems likely that the interstitial is at least contributing to this pattern given the correlation during your test and given the fact that Google has specifically noted that they view interstitial pop-ups (at least certain implementations) as detrimental to the user experience. It is also possible that it isn't the interstitial itself that is raising a red flag as a ranking signal, but some other related issue (for instance, if the interstitial causes a significant page load delay, higher bounce rate, or if there is some rendering issue caused by the implementation of the pop-up).
As you note, if the interstitial is the issue, I would have expected it to affect mobile primarily and desktop less so - so the fact that the result is the opposite is surprising and may indicate a different cause for the traffic dips. I assume that you have compared this data not just WoW but YoY and are certain that the pattern isn't seasonal.
We do know, however, that Google is starting to move in the direction of mobile first in how they rank sites, making the mobile index and experience their primary source for rankings of both mobile and desktop versions.
In any case I would recommend testing a version of your pop-up which is not of a type that Google would consider "intrusive" (see this post for more detail: http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-rolling-mobile-intrusive-interstitials-penalty-yesterday-267408) or adding a trigger to it (so for instance, don't show the popup immediately but only if the user scrolls a certain percentage of the page, or remains on the page for a set period of time).
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RE: Link Anchor Text - Best Practice?
Hi Mark,
Is the link part of a navigation menu? If so I don't see any problem with leaving it as 'Home'. If you're linking within the body of a page (for instance in a blogpost), something like 'visit the homepage' or just a branded term should be fine.
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RE: Which software for Play Store rakings do you use?
Hi Gaston,
In the past I've used MobileDevHQ (now called TUNE) and AppAnnie. MDHQ used to be free I believe, but now is a paid tool. AppAnnie is a paid tool but there are some functionalities available for a free account I think so they may be worth checking out depending on what you need.
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RE: Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
Hi Pugh,
It sounds like you haven't implemented the rel=canonical tag for mobile. This tag works a bit like the hreflang tag, namely it prevents your mobile site from being viewed as duplicate content and should mean that your mobile URL is displayed in mobile SERPs and your desktop URL is displayed in desktop SERPs.
To implement (for more info see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
on the desktop page, add:
and on the **corresponding **mobile page, the required annotation should be:
This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.
Make sure you are referencing the corresponding URLs (so www.example.com/xyz and m.example.com/xyz, rather than simply referencing the mobile homepage).
Hope that helps!
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RE: Hiding content or links in responsive design
Hi,
Saijo and Bradley are right in saying that hiding elements on a smaller screen should not be an issue (as it's a correct implementation of responsive design). Bear in mind as well that there is a Googlebot and a Smartphone Googlebot, so as long as the Googlebot is seeing what desktop users see and the Smartphone Googlebot (which uses an iPhone5 user agent) is seeing what mobile users see, it shouldn't be a problem.
The only thing I would add:
If you are going to use display:none to prevent a user from seeing something when they view your site, it's good to include an option to 'view full site' or 'view desktop site'. Also in that case I would question whether you actually need that content on the desktop site at all? Because best practice is to provide all the same content regardless of device.
If it's hidden but still accessible to the mobile user (in a collapsible div for instance) there's no cloaking involved so it shouldn't cause a problem.
As a side note: the Vary HTTP header is really for a dynamically served website (that is, a single URL which checks user agent and then serves the desktop HTML to desktop devices and mobile HTML to mobile devices).
Hope that helps!
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RE: How to optimize this iphone app
Hi Bob,
There's a few key areas which have an impact on app store rankings:
- keywords in title and description
- ratings (therefore make sure you're addressing any issues and responding to negative reviews)
- downloads
You can also translate the title and description into other languages, as this can help increase downloads from other countries (provided your app works internationally, international users will potentially be able to use it even if its primary language is English). And you can promote it on your site; ideally, detect the user agent of your mobile visitors and show them the version for their device.
I'd also suggest testing Facebook promoted posts which allow users to be taken directly to the app store to download your app.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
Hi Pugh,
Glad to hear it! Yes, you should also implement the tag on your homepages.
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RE: Is it a good idea to target a similar versions of a keyword?
Hi Chris,
Don't use two separate pages for these queries - they are effectively the same (just a different wording for the same thing).
As the other commenters have noted, these terms are very similar and given the way Google is continuously moving towards semantic search and understanding concepts/topics rather than strict keyword matching, you should easily be to target both terms with a single page. The only reason not to do this would be if 'attorney' and 'lawyer' were actually two totally different services but as far as I know that is not the case, they're simply synonyms (at least in layperson's terms - even if there's a technical distinction presumably your target audience won't be likely to know or care).
Creating two different pages for what is basically the same topic will therefore not be useful to users and could get you in trouble with Google - at the very least you'll be confusing the search engine as it won't know which one is more relevant, and you'll be splitting any potential link equity you might get to those pages.
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RE: Movil Migration
Hi Romaro,
Migrating from a separate mobile version of a site to a version which shares the same URL should work like any other domain migration.
You should 301 the old URLs to the equivalent page on the new version, and remove the switchboard tag code from the desktop pages.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Screen Resolution Concern in Google Analytics Mobile App
Hi Francis,
They should be different sessions, they could be the same type of device or even the same device used in a different way.
There is also a report which will tell you exactly what devices were used, which might be helpful.
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RE: Besides description and design optimization, is there any other main factor that we can influence to get better App Store rankings?
Hi Gaston,
App store optimization is pretty straightforward, and making sure that your title and description are well optimized is a great starting point. Other app store ranking factors which are very important are number of downloads and positive reviews, so anything you can do to encourage more downloads and more positive reviews (as long as you remain within app store guidelines) should help your app store rankings. I'm not currently aware of any 'external' (i.e. non-app store) factors such as social media or links. You can also set up app indexation if you have website content which is the same as your app content, and this can help with discovery.
You may also find this presentation from Emily Grossman to be useful: http://www.slideshare.net/Suzzicks/app-store-optimization-smx-munich-emily-grossman
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RE: Desktop vs. Mobile Website - ranking impact
Hi Tom, this will likely impact your mobile rankings, as the smartphone crawler is the one which primarily feeds the mobile index. Best practice would say to make the mobile content as close to the desktop version as possible, but I understand that sometimes the resources are simply not available.
My concern would be that if you remove all internal links to the pages, the crawler will no longer find that page in new crawls and may eventually remove it from the mobile index, or may discount the importance of the page. Of course, if it isn't mobile friendly, you may end up losing rankings anyway if competitors create a more mobile-friendly experience.
A couple thoughts:
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is the page getting valuable traffic from that position 1 ranking? If so, I'd strongly suggest including it on your list of pages to make mobile-friendly. If not, perhaps it doesn't matter if it loses the high ranking.
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you could create a sitemap which includes those pages, so that the crawler can discover them even if they're not linked to internally. I don't know that this will prevent a negative impact but it could aid discovery.
Hope that helps.
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RE: Content on desktop and mobile
Hi Johannes,
I've understood your question to be about how to treat a site which uses dynamic serving for mobile content. Is this correct?
If your site keeps the same URLs for mobile and desktop versions, but serves different content based on user agent, then you will simply need to include a Vary-HTTP header. You can learn more about that here.
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RE: Hiding Elements on Mobile. Will this effect SEO.
Hi Judd,
If you are only hiding these elements on the mobile view, this shouldn't cause an issue from a rankings perspective. You will want to make sure that they can access your CSS file (sometimes CSS files are blocked from crawlers).
It is possible that having it hidden will mean they discount that content slightly for the mobile version, but as long as they know it's a mobile version of the desktop site they will primarily take the desktop signals into consideration when it comes to rankings (with a small boost for mobile-friendliness in the mobile SERPs).
Once the mobile-first index rolls out this will change but they have stated that with mobile-first indexing, hiding content for space reasons won't negatively impact how they weight that content, so that shouldn't affect your approach practically speaking.
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RE: How search engines look at collapse content in mobile while on desktop it open by default?
I have to disagree with the above.
Google absolutely can view mobile content, in fact they have a separate crawler that spoofs a mobile user agent in order to crawl mobile content. They may not have a separate mobile index of that content, but that has nothing to do with whether they view, crawl, and index mobile pages. We know that they do, in fact, given that whether a page is mobile-friendly is a rankings factor for mobile search results.
To answer your question - having the content collapsed shouldn't be a problem as long as the content is viewable with Javascript and CSS disabled. If Javascript is required to expand the collapsed content, the mobile crawler may not be able to see this content. You may want to test the page(s) with the Mobile-friendly Testing Tool and also try a Fetch and Render (for Smartphone) of the mobile page, to see how Google sees the page(s).
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RE: Sitemaps:
Hi romaro,
From my understanding, using these tags as part of a mobile XML sitemap is not necessary and in fact, Google don't recommend having a separate mobile sitemap: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html
Instead, for a dynamically served site, the important things are:
- Use the Vary HTTP header to signal your changes depending on the user-agent.
- Detect user-agent strings correctly.
You can read more about Google's guidelines for dynamic serving here: https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving
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RE: SEO implications of off-site secure Donation page
Hi James,
Great question! My two cents would be as follows:
Firstly, I'm assuming that there is no way that you can make the responsive pages show up with the same domain as the current non-responsive site.
I'm guessing that you are building these pages on a different platform than the main site, but it is possible to use multiple platforms on a single domain (for instance, many websites build their blog on Wordpress and their main site using something different) - so I'm curious about why in this case you are choosing to make it a totally separate domain.
Assuming that this is the only way to do it, my first question would be: are these pages something that would be indexed normally on the main site? You mention they are 'Action' pages - search engines may not need to index transaction pages, for example, where the only purpose is to submit a payment or sign up for something. Unless you also expect these pages to rank as entry pages, but if users are navigating to these pages primarily from a different landing page, they may not be relevant to search engines at all.
If this is the case, and you are still concerned about appearing to send users to a different website, you could consider making the donate button to these pages initially link to a page on the existing domain (like www.maindomain.org/secure) which could then immediately redirect to the secure version. You could nofollow this link and block the transaction pages on the other domain from search (I usually see no reason to have purely transactional pages indexed, but I may be missing some context in this case.) However, this may run the risk of looking like you are trying to do something sneaky with redirects.
You could also include a note on the first page (the one the user is on before being taken to the secure site), next to that 'donate'/'signup' button/link that states "by clicking this link, you will be taken to our secure platform at 'domain.com' to complete your donation/signup".
I do like the idea of including the name of the charity in this secondary domain if possible, to help make it clear that they are connected. You could optimize the pages' meta data to include the name of the charity as well.
I don't believe there is a negative consequence (generally speaking) to sending a user off-site - unless you appear to be running some sort of 'doorway' page scheme, or using sneaky redirects to show Google one thing and the user something else. My one caveat: I'm not sure what you mean by "booting" the user- I could see it potentially seeming problematic if the user is automatically sent somewhere without choosing to navigate to the other domain...it could even fall under the category of 'malicious behavior'. But as long as the user is choosing to click on a link that takes them to a 'donate' or 'sign up' page, even if it's hosted on a different domain, I don't see that creating a major issue for Google.
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RE: What does actually Mobile First Index means?
Hi Micey, Roman's overview is good, if you want more detailed explanations and recommendations I suggest reading Cindy Krum's 3 part series on her MobileMoxie blog: