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There is a similar thread here: http://moz.com/community/q/what-if-my-site-isn-t-ready-for-mobile-armageddon-by-april-21st

If you have a lot of mobile visitors coming in via Google, I think you may expect that this traffic will disappear (unless your competitors aren't very mobile friendly as well).

Nobody really knows what the impact is going to be, most discussions seem to agree that the impact will only be for mobile searches, but again, it's difficult to predict.

It also seems that it's defined on page - not site level, so you could try to provide mobile versions for your most important landing pages (dedicated or responsive). Your lay-out seems pretty straight forward, so I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to adapt it Remember that it doesn't have to perfect - it just needs to pass the "mobile friendly" test - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ - you can always improve later on.

Hope this helps

Dirk

Hugh,

Without the actual url is difficult to judge what's going on. If it's a recent site the difference could be related to the crawl frequency. You could always try to double check with a crawler like Screaming Frog (free is you use an url list or for the first 500 crawls).

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Ravi,

Did you use the robots.txt tester in Webmastertools - your robots.txt mentions to block /catalogsearch - if you want to block the entire directory I think you have to use

Disallow: /catalogsearch/

On top of that /catalogsearch is only blocked for Googlebot-image - not for the "normal" Googlebot - if you want to have it blocked for all bots you have to move it to the beginning of the file. Idem for /admin => should be /admin/ and in the beginning of your robots.txt file

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

If it's just a new template and all the other factors remain the same - you should have no (negative) impact. If you switch to a mobile template, don't forget to also test the speed of your pages & the size of your images - it's nice that the site is responsive but if you have a lot of very heavy images, and the sites loads slow on mobiles, the gain will be minimal.

The traffic drop related to site migrations is very often related to changing the structure, generating a lot of 404's when not all the pages are redirected. Google seems to be cautious when suddenly there is a spike of 404's and reduces the traffic for a while. Once everything is back to normal, traffic (normally) returns.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

Why would you do that for? A coming soon page has no value for visitors, and as a result no value for search engines.

If you're going to create a new site, I would first launch the new site and then redirect the old pages to the new ones.

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

I would try fetching these pages like Google, or use a tool like http://web-sniffer.net/ to check these pages. If you just do a visual inspection, it's quite possible that you are seeing the correct the page, but that the header returns a 404 instead. Check also https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en.

If they are really properly redirected, you can mark them as fixed in WMT to make them disappear. If not it's no use deleting them as they will reappear a few days later.

rgds,

Dirk

Great news - strange that these 608 errors didn't appear while crawling the site with Screaming Frog.

I think every SEO struggles with this question from time to time. It's frustrating to see competitors rank high with shady techniques. On the long run, I remain convinced that "clean" SEO and putting your customer/visitor experience first remains the winning strategy. And yes, sometimes Google does confirm it. With the Panda update in May last year I saw a lot of our shady competitors take a plunge in rankings, while our sites increased both rankings & search traffic (in some cases +60% in search traffic). So be patient, Google becomes better and better at fighting spam.

Not sure about this specific message you got, but very often messages like this from Webmaster tools only include a few sample links, and then you have to figure it out yourself which the other pages are where the problems occur (Google wouldn't dare to make our lives too easy)

Strange case - you do rank for the full title (Formosan Odyssey: Taiwan, Past and Present - position 3) - and number 1 for the first phrase of your description. Google works in mysterious ways...

Two remarks on the page - the image of the cover is incredibly heavy (https://camphorpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Formosan-Odyssey-cover.jpg) - you might to optimise that & there is an issue with the review markup (check https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/  - reviewed item is missing)

However - the heavy covers equally apply to the other pages on your site, and I imagine the review markup problem as well so it's not an explanation of why this specific page doesn't rank for the book title.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

It's only a small detail & not important for your site - in the footer you have a link to "Elegant Themes" which is too close to the Wordpress links. You have a 99% score for Mobile experience so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Check the details on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcarhire-southafrica.co.za%2Fcar-hire-durban%2F - the error is mentioned at the bottom of the page.

rgds,

Dirk

It would be better to indicate the "nofollow" on the level of the link rather than on page level (as it will only impact the paid rather than all the links) but if this is not possible, the tag you want to use is ok.

rgds,

Dirk

I doubt that it's Sandbox - if you look at the common signals for Sandbox (http://moz.com/blog/googles-sandbox-still-exists-exemplified-by-gradercom) your site would not be found for any keyword, not even your brand name, and have normal rankings in Bing.

I did a few very specific searches with phrases from your site both on Bing & Google:
"Everything that you are looking to achieve with your home addition or renovation project" => both have the same result (=your site)

Search for brand name - rank 1 in Bing - rank 3 google - so doesn't look like a typical Sandbox situation.

Rgds,

Dirk

PS Noticed that the speed of your site improved dramatically - so hopefully you will see you site start to rank soon

Hi,

If you still find errors in WMT I would do a full site crawl with screaming frog to be sure that no errors remain.
Apart from that, I fear you will have to be patient & hope for the best. One of our sites was hacked (2times in a 3 month period) - we lost about 30% of search traffic, and it took us about 3 months to recover (we fully recovered, but we were in a pretty specific niche, with a lot of long tail searches and not that much competition)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Erik

With this setup - I fear you will have issues later on as well when trying to optimise the site for SEO (which part of the site will be accessible for the Google bot?)

Rather than for Server Side redirects (based on ip) I would offer first time visitors to "Choose your country" page - and store their choice in a cookie, so they are redirected to the proper site on subsequent visits. As an example of what I mean: http://www.volvocars.com/language-selector. This way you can validate the webmastertools using both GA or HTML file.

If that is not an option, than DNS seems to be the only proper way to do the validation (it is not as complicated as it may seem)

rgds,

Dirk

Is it possible to generate your image sitemap with the cached versions of the images that are actually used on the pages - or not to use the caching for images, and use the "normal" versions instead.

I think that the main reason why the images are not indexed is that in your site map you tell Google that on page xyz.html there is an image abc.jpg - but Google bot is unable to find abc.jpg on the page as it is the image fkkflmskgmlkdf.jpg which is used on the page.

Fully agree - would definitely ask for nofollow links.

Hi Luke,

To me, it doesn't seem really abnormal that a university would have tons of links going to associated companies, alumni companies,.. etc. I think the basic question is - do these links look "natural" when you check them, or are they rather commercial. If they make sense on the page, or add value, I would leave them. If not, make them nofollow.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

Could you explain what exactly you want to achieve? Do you want to validate that the Zopim script is present on all pages? If the script is embedded in the HTML - the easiest way to check if it's present on your page is using Screaming Frog (you need the paid version to do this if you want to crawl - if you have the full list of url's of the site in z .txt file , you could also use the trial version by using it in "List Mode"). Before you crawl the site - make 2 custom filters:

• Filter 1: contains                window.$zopim
• Filter 2: does not contain:  window.$zopim

=> crawl the site (if you only need to check if these scripts are present on the page - in Configuration>Spider uncheck the boxes for Images, CSS, Javascript, External links)

=> after the crawl - select the "Custom Tab" - applying Filter 1 will show you all the pages that contain the script - Filter 2 the pages that don't contain the script.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Donald,

There are some issues with your site which could be causing the problems:

1. The load time of the homepage is quite slow -http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150316_8R_Y5A/1/details/ - apart from the heavy images, you also load a huge number of css & js files. If you analyse the page with Google Pagespeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fprimedraftarchitecture.com%2F&tab=desktop you get very low scores  - both for mobile & desktop. I would remove some of the fancy stuff on the page & focus on the essentials. Follow the recommendation of both tools to make your site faster. This would be the top priority if it was my site.

2. There are some smaller on-page issues

• not all the pages have a H1 title
  - http://primedraftarchitecture.com/architecture-consultation has a canonical url which doesn't exist
  - http://primedraftarchitecture.com/author/mike-sweebe/ exist 2 times (duplicate: http://primedraftarchitecture.com/author/Mike-Sweebe/)
• images are quite heavy (11 > 100kb)

3; Analytics

You seem to use both Universal & async tags on page (Universal on Contact / Async on the remainder) - on /blog you measure multiple 6 page views when only one should be measured. I would put everything on universal (and implement it in the head-tag

Hope this helps,

Dirk