Lost Rankings Late April Even Though We Have A Mobile Site

[inhouseseo]

I have noticed a significant drop in rankings since late April. It is about a 30% drop in organic from Google.

This is despite the fact that we launched a mobile site before the update. What gives?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

[hectormainar]

There are a lot of factors which could have caused this. Without a background of your last actions, links, changes... or at least the domain name, it is impossible to give any valid answer.

Too generic question, sorry

[Andy.Drinkwater]

This is despite the fact that we launched a mobile site before the update. What gives?

The mobile algorithm would have nothing to do with desktop results, unless you are referring to mobile SERPs?

-Andy

[Matthew_Edgar]

Sorry to hear about the drop in traffic. Like Hector said, it is really tough to know what caused the drop without more information. A few questions to clarify on this...

1. Like Andy said, are you referring to mobile organic traffic or overall organic traffic? What is the decrease in organic traffic per device (desktop, tablet, mobile)?

2. Let's go with it maybe having something to do with Google's mobile changes. Do you pass Google's mobile friendly test? I have seen a number of sites that had mobile sites, but they didn't fully pass Google's criteria. Do you see any errors listed in Google Search Console (Search Traffic -> Mobile Usability)?

3. If it isn't something with mobile, what other changes have you made to your site lately? Removed any pages? Removed any redirects? Blocked pages from Google's crawlers due to a code upgrade? Have you run a crawl test on your site - it can sometimes be the most basic of things that happened accidentally. Have you also checked for errors in Search Console?

4. Looking outside of your site, have any of your competitors made changes and/or gained rankings? Maybe the decrease in traffic doesn't have anything to do with you, just a competitor moving up quickly. I'd check the rankings report in Moz as well as the Search Analytics report in Google Search Console to see if you notice any changes.

Hope those questions give you some help in figuring out what is up.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, and thanks for your question! Did you see Hector and Matthew's responses? We'd love to help you sort this issue out. But first, we need some details. Please let us know if you are able to answer Hector and Matthew's questions or not. Thanks!

Christy

[inhouseseo]

Hi There,

The drop in traffic was for desktop organic.

We have never had a manual penalty. The last actions we took as far as link building was about 4 months ago:

• It was removing some links with exact match anchor text via outreach

• Uploaded a disavow file with a number of links

• Added a couple of links via broken link building method

We also added some product descriptions.

Other than that we haven't really done much on the site. The traffic drop was around the same time the mobile algo update rolled out.

Thanks for your help.

[inhouseseo]

Hi There,

The drop in traffic was for desktop organic.We do have a mobile site.

In WMT, I see 365 errors under mobile usability (viewport, font size, elements too close). We have over 100K pages.

The traffic we get is for long-tail keywords. Most of which we are not tracking because the volume for each keyword would be so low. It seems too much of a coincidence that all of our competitors would move up at once for the same terms, causing a drop in our traffic.

The last actions we took as far as link building was about 4 months ago:

• It was removing some links with exact match anchor text via outreach

• Added a couple of links via broken link building method

We also added some product descriptions.

Other than that we haven't really done much on the site. The traffic drop was around the same time the mobile algo update rolled out.

Thanks for your help.

[Matthew_Edgar]

If it is a drop in organic desktop traffic, then that won't be caused by the mobile change (as Andy said). Out of curiosity, what are your percentages of organic traffic by device? Does mobile account for a sizable amount of your organic traffic? I'm wondering if mobile is being mis-reported as desktop?

While I'm doubtful that mobile usability issues would cause a drop in desktop traffic (assuming it is legitimately desktop traffic not being mis-reported), one easy way to test this would be to take a page that get lots of organic traffic that has mobile usability issues reported, fix those mobile usability issues. This ranking factor is real time and page by page (see Search Engine Land), so you should see some results quickly if that is the factor.

Another question for you - what exactly did you change about your product descriptions? Meta description, on-page text, both? Are those the pages that lost traffic? Maybe try reverting back and see what impact that has.

I'm guessing you don't want to share your domain here, but feel free to connect with me privately with the website URL and I'd be happy to take a look at your domain more specifically to see if I can spot anything else that might be causing this issue.