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Hm, you're in a tough spot.

Is your domain a unique name, like "Moz," or is it a description of what you are, like "SEO Info"? I ask because it's possible that your brand name is really a competitive keyword that you're just not strong enough to compete for, which could explain why you don't rank for it.

Also, have you looked through your link profile since 2013? It's possible that you have been hit by a spam penalty again. Even if you haven't purchased more links, if someone hits you with some negative SEO or if you picked up a few low quality links without high quality links to balance things out, it's possible you've been hit again.

To second Ryan's point: Google definitely sees http://example.com as a separate page than http://www.example.com, but I'd be surprised if you can distance yourself from bad links pointing to http://example.com by focusing on http://www.example.com. Google's pretty smart, it knows that those two pages are usually one and the same.

To your 302 redirect point: Google's seem enough improperly used 302 redirects (both accidentally and for SEO reasons, like this) to start treating 302 redirects as 301s if they stay in place over time, according to a test Geoff Kenyon worked on. A 302 redirect may work for a little while, but it's not a long term solution.

To dig into this a bit deeper:

• Does the www version of your site rank for your brand name? Is it just the non-www version that's been hit?
• When did you submit a reconsideration request, and what was Google's response? Did they say that your penalty has been lifted?
• What is the value of your current domain name? I've heard of companies that have a small enough brand awareness, it's better business sense to just restart from the ground up with a new domain. Is that where you are, or do you have a pretty solid business built up?

Hi Dov,

You can definitely create separate sitemaps and GWT accounts for your two subdirectories if you prefer, but I don't think that it'll solve your problem. It sounds like the problem is, pages on the original subdirectory probably have a higher Page Authority and are outranking your new pages.

When there are two pages on the same site that are both relevant for a search term, Google tries to only display one. So, your best bet is to make sure that there aren't any pages on the old subdirectory that are relevant to the keywords that you want the new subdirectory to rank for. You have two options here:

1. Remove pages from the old subdirectory that are ranking for terms that you want the new subdirectory to rank for. 301 redirect their URLs to the new subdirectory.
2. For pages that you would like to stay on the site, change the wording so it doesn't compete with the new subdirectory.

I realize this is really general guidance, but it's tough to give more specific feedback unless I can see the site.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

Hi again,

I think you may be reading too much into this.

Google used to have separate mobile indexes, and I do remember something about them possibly combining them (although I can't find any articles on that now), but that does not mean that Google doesn't crawl pages that are dynamically served, or recognize that they're different from desktop versions of pages.

I know that your site is partially dynamically served and partially desktop-only, but luckily Google crawls by page, rather than by site. It will be able to figure out which of your pages are mobile optimize and which aren't. It's true that 404ing for mobile agents may mess with that, which is part of why that isn't a good idea. (The other is that it's pretty bad user experience. If someone bookmarks a desktop link to your site, then tries to access it on their phone, if they get a 404 they're going to think your site is broken!)

You're obviously free to keep investigating, but I'm worried you're going to go in circles with all of the partial information out there. Google's pretty smart; build a good, clean site and it'll be able to read it.

Best,

Kristina

Good luck!

I think that you're making a pretty big assumption by thinking that Google only has one index. Everything that Google has said and SEOs have seen - the fact that there's a separate Googlebot for mobile, the "mobile friendly" designation, and different results on mobile search than desktop - indicate that Google has a separate index, or at least modifies its desktop index for search.

The only thing that we've found so far is that Google uses the desktop page title and meta description for mobile results. So, I assume that Google is pulling meta data from the desktop crawl to display in mobile search results. It doesn't mean that there isn't a mobile index.

That said, as I responded to your separate question, returning a 404 if you're using a mobile device is not a good idea. Not because of a single index, but because this isn't standard practice, and I have no idea how Google will interpret that. It could lower mobile searches unnecessarily or cause some sort of a cloaking penalty. I doubt it'll pull it in and out of the index.

The best method here is to just let mobile visitors access desktop versions of the page where there isn't a mobile version. Like you mentioned, you could add a pop up inviting them to the mobile version of the site, which will send them to the mobile homepage, but that will probably increase your bounce rate dramatically. You'll have to test a few options to find the best one.

Good luck!

Kristina

Ah, sorry about that, since your link on your desktop site has a parameter, I assumed that you were setting up a separate mobile site (which is what you referred to, with a different subdomain) rather than a dynamically served site, which is what you actually have.

Which means you're absolutely right, you don't need links between the two pages.

In that case, I think you're okay. I just double checked on Amazon.com, which is probably the most famous, most powerful dynamically served site in the world. Its mobile version of the homepage has the code:

<title>Amazon.com</title>

But, mobile search results for "amazon.com" return:

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers ...

Online retailer of books, mobies, music and games along with electronics, toys, apparel, sports, tools, groceries, and...

That's the page title and meta description of the desktop version of the site.

I'll admit, I've never seen Google admit to using the desktop version of the page title and meta description before. But, if Google's doing it to Amazon - whose site we know Google crawls and understands - I think you're okay. Like you said, you have the "mobile friendly" designation, so my guess is, this is a Google decision, not a mistake on your part.

I hope that eases your worries a bit! Really, I don't think there's anything you need to do here. And, I really appreciate you bringing this into the community. I learned something today!

Best,

Kristina

Hi again,

I'm not a developer, so I can't ask your direct question about how to return 404s to mobile visitors and 200s to desktop visitors, but I would like to weigh in on the best practices here.

The reason Google is continuing to index these pages even though they're not formatted for mobile is because Google wants to give mobile visitors access to the same information as desktop visitors. If there is content on your desktop site that isn't on your mobile site, Google will just return those desktop pages.

Standard options for you are:

• Allow mobile visitors to access those pages, knowing they won't have a great user experience, but allowing them to find exactly what they were looking for. You can use Google Analytics to understand which pages mobile visitors are seeing the most and prioritize converting those pages to mobile.
• For mobile pages that have consolidated content from desktop pages, you can rel="alternate" each desktop page to the consolidated mobile page.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Google needs a way to find the mobile version of the page - either through a link on your site (like the link I recommended you change to "follow"), a rel="alternate" tag, or a link from another site. Google crawls nofollowed links, but it doesn't add a page after a nofollowed link to the index if it's not already in there.

Best recommendation is to use the rel="alternate" tag, but I figured the easier answer was to "follow" the link you've already got in there.

Good luck,

Kristina

Hi Ted,

I think I may have found the issue: your "Switch to Mobile View" link has a rel="nofollow" on it, so while Google is probably finding and accurately reading the page, you've asked it not to index it.

Just remove the "nofollow" attribute and you should be fine.

Best,

Kristina

This sounds odd to me - in my experience, if you want to load one page by a server sends you another, that's a redirect. It doesn't matter how the technology works on the server side as long as the initial URL returns a 301 before the server returns a different page.

It's possible that you and your tech guys aren't really talking about different things, you're just coming at it from different angles. Could you ask them to implement the solution they're suggesting, then use http://httpstatus.io/ to test an http:// URL to see what server code it returns? That might be a good way to communicate what you're looking for. The important thing here is to stress that your tech guys can code the server however they want, as long as it has the right output (301 redirects).

And, of course, use canonicals.

It could be, if they made the switch improperly and Google isn't transferring link equity or can't find new pages. I like checking on services like Archive.org to get backing for my ideas, but I think that you should probably reach out directly to your client and ask about their activities in April.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hi there,

You've got a lot of things going on here. I'm worried that Google thinks your site is exceptionally spammy or has malware, since it's showing your .pdf or .doc files but not as many of you HTML pages. But I can't make any definitive statements because I'd need a lot more information. If I were you, I would:

• Dig into Google Analytics to get a better idea of what exactly has lost organic traffic, and when

• Look at the trend:

• Is it a slow decline or a sharp drop? Sharp drop typically means a penalty or that the company accidentally deindexed their pages or something equally horrifying. A slow decline could be an algorithm change (at least the ones I've seen take their time to really take effect) or a new competitor.

• When did it start? That way you can pinpoint what changes happened around then.

• Is it a steady decline or has it been jumping up and down? If it's a steady decline, it's probably one thing you're looking for; if traffic is erratic, there could be a bunch of problems.

• Find out which pages are losing traffic.

• _Are all pages on the site losing traffic? _If they are, it's probably an algorithm change or a change that was made by webmasters sitewide. If it's specific pages, it could be that there's now better competition for those key terms.

• Which pages are losing the most traffic? When did their traffic start to drop? Is it different from the rest of the site? You may need to investigate at a deeper level here. Individual pages could have new competition, you may have accidentally changed site structure and lessened internal links to it, and/or it may have lost some external links.

• Get an accurate list of every unique page on your site to clear up duplicate indexation and find out if anything _isn't _in Google's index.

• Add a canonical to all pages on your site pointing to the version of the URL you want in Google's index. It's a good way to make sure that parameters and other accidental variations don't lead to duplicate content.

• Divide that list into site sections and create separate XML sitemaps by section. That way you have a better idea of what is indexed and what isn't in Google Webmaster Tools. I got this idea from this guy (who is also my boss) and I swear by it.

• Based on traffic in Google Analytics, pick out pages that used to get a lot of traffic and now get none. Search for them in Google with site:[url] search to see if Google's got them indexed.

After that, if you're still stumped, definitely come back here with a little more info - we'll all be happy to help!

Kristina

Hmmm, this is a weird one. My guess is, since Google originally found those links (maybe before your site launched, but the pages were linked to and live through the IP address?), it keeps returning to them and finding them. In that case, not much you can do, but keep those canonicals on.

Canonicals really can save you from duplicate content problems: I've had clients with multiple versions of every page based on the path you take to a page, and canonicals have allowed them to rank well and avoid penalties entirely. As long as you're doing everything else right, hopefully this shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Sorry this ended up falling on you!

Hm, this could have, though. When did you first notice these backlinks from the IP address in GWT?

downunderseo - are these new accounts? Did this solve your problem?

Well, from an SEO perspective, this hasn't lead to any penalties or reduced rankings, right?

Did you add canonicals, at least, to make sure that Google wouldn't find duplicate content? That's what I'd be most worried about, from an SEO perspective.

_Definitely _don't create any duplicate content here. I think you're on the right track, though: create some navigation pages that are optimized for unbranded search, and use those as an alternative way to find product pages, beyond just the original branded way.

Good luck!

Kristina

Hi Denise,

A couple of points here. First, it's not that you necessarily need the same number of pages on your mobile site as your non-mobile site, it's that any content that you have on your non-mobile site should be represented somewhere on your mobile site. It's possible that your competitors are ranking with their desktop sites because they're targeting content that you are missing with your mobile site, and maybe on your desktop site as well.

Second, yes and no. Your mobile site is a separate site, but if you connect your mobile pages to their corresponding desktop pages with rel=alternate and canonical tags, Google should transfer some of that link equity for you. Google breaks it down here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

Good luck!

Kristina