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I just hope they give us some more time to get things resolved and roll this out slowly so that it is not like a major penalty.

Lots of great responses from the Moz community. Thank you.  I got pretty concerned about this because we see alot of our organic traffic as coming from mobile.  I'm taking this pretty seriously and have already hired a programmer to get the site fully responsive.  My deadline for getting it completed is 10-14 days, so I hope that Google gives us some more time to implement changes.

At first I was a bit disheartened, but this is actually pushing me to get changes done that I have been procrastinating on, so maybe it is a good thing.

I just hope that the criteria Google uses for mobile compatibility is fairly loose, so it is obvious what needs to be fixed to be considered mobile friendly.

Best Regards,

I just received a warning in Webmaster Tools that my site pages are not optimized for mobile devices and the search results for pages will be decreased in mobile searches.  Just got it yesterday and I see no drop yet, but anyone else seen this????

The notice states that the site is not optimized for viewport, text size and proper space for clickable elements.  All of that is true since we have not yet completed our responsive design conversion.

Any idea if Google will give us a little time to get this resolved, or do my rankings start dropping right away?

Just when you think you are moving forward with Google, they pull the rug out again...

I am actually seeing that after a delay the rankings have rebounded and now are higher than before.   The backlinks are now again showing up in GWT.  I still think that the warning from Google and temporary drop are connected, but I guess in the long term it really doesnt matter.

We had some products on the Steals and Deals segment of Good Morning America.   The same day we received a message from Google in Webmaster Tools (below).  The message says that search result clicks have increased significantly. It seems like this was almost a warning that they were not sure this was valid. The promotion included a link from the good morning america site on yahoo to a subdomain on our site.

The rankings have fallen a good little bit since and in Webmaster tools, there are no links to our site listed and no internal links and no content keywords for the site.

Is this is a temporary freeze on our site until they figure out if this is manipulative?   I would have thought a link from Good Morning America would be great for SEO.

Search results clicks for http://www.justjen.com/ have increased significantly.

This message is not indicative of any problem in your site. It is simply to inform you that the number of clicks that one of your pages receives has increased recently. If you have just added new content, this may indicate that it has become more popular on Google. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates.

My Webmaster Tools account has stopped showing data past 9/23, which is a full week old.  Typically it is just a few days behind schedule.  Is Google cutting this off?

Did Google launch a Penguin penalty update today?  One of my pages, which has been penalized in the past due to too much exact anchor text, just got slammed again today. Went from #5 to nowhere to be seen.  Last time this happened, I contacted some sites and got rid of some of the links, but I wonder if they changed the bar again today?

Thanks or the response John.  I'm just a little swamped today, but I will look over your posts over the weekend and get back to you.  Do you have a website for the company  or any other information that I could look over?

Lawrence Smith

I am looking to hire an expert link builder who specializes in building very high-quality links and creating content that attracts links.  There used to be a board on the site to post this to, but I cant find it anymore.   What is the best way to find qualified SEO experts who are mozzers?

Yes I think it was a Penguin drop. There is one other thing about the page that dropped. It is using a 301 re-direct.   I had updated the page url a while ago, but nearly all of the links to the page are to the old page.  So this penalty might be a combination of signals that collectively have tagged that page.

I'm working on cleaning up the link profile right now.   I think that Penguin is a very imperfect animal.   But I cant change the beast, so I will just have to make some changes here.

Thanks for the reply!

What happened was that I added a new page and accidentally used the canonical for the page that was ranking well for search terms on that new page.

So to state it a different way - I added a new Page B to the site, but instead of using the canonical for that page, I accidentally used the canonical for Page A.  Page A is the page that previously had ranked well for search terms.  On Saturday night or Sunday, Page A dropped out of all of the search terms that it ranks for.  However, I did a little more research and Page A is still in the index, it just doesnt rank for any of the search terms it used to.  Page B is also in the index, but since it is a new page, it does not really rank for any terms.  Obviously, I have fixed the canonical on Page B and Google already has the new page in its cache.

As far as over-optimization penalties, Page A has nearly all the inbound links with anchor text that is only a slight variation of the search term.  It is the page on the site that I would have expected to have got hit by Penguin.  There are some other pages that have lost a little bit of ranking, but nothing drastic.

I am just surprised that if it is a Penguin penalty, it would completely lose ranking on the terms in a single day, rather than moving down the rankings to maybe the third or fourth page.  Do you find that Penguin penalties usually result in a lower ranking, or completely losing rankings?

Either way, I'm going to go in and clean up the link profile, but it would be nice to know how aggressive I should be to try to recover that page.

Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action.

I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings.  If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index?

The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update.  The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text.  As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update.

One last question:  The page completely dropped from the search index.  If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position?

If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?

I just recently saw a huge decline in the page rank of a specific page on my site.  When I investigated a bit further I noticed that the drop in page rank looks like it is due to the fact that most of the links to the page come through 301 re-directs from an old page.  I know you just made a change to Open Site Explorer.   Did you change the way that you are treating 301 re-directs?

Here is the new page:

http://www.justjen.com/shop/big-sister-tshirts.htm

Here is the old page:

http://www.justjen.com/shop/bigsister-tshirts.htm

Up until the last couple of days, the new page was showing the links from the old page in your cache, but as of today, the new page is only showing the links that go to it, not the links to the old page that is re-directed to it.

If there was a change recently, was this intentional (trying to replicate the search engines better) or is it an oversight or database anomaly?