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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: 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. 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.

Cloaking is defined as providing different content to users then to search engine crawlers. That is not what is happening here. Users and search engines see the same picture. The source of the image is irrelevant. Many sites use content delivery networks to deliver images. If you are viewing the page from California, then perhaps a server in San Jose, CA will deliver your image. Meanwhile if you view that same page in Texas, then perhaps a Dallas, TX server will deliver the same content. The delivered files COULD have different names or paths, but the actual content delivered should be the same. No, this is not cloaking and does not impact SEO directly. As oznappies points out, there may be other issues with the page which cause it to load very slowly and not perform well, and those issues can impact SEO.

Not a function, and I didn't mean to state that you had to use PhpED to see the problem, just pointing out how I did find it. With any page loaded, on the right hand side you will see a handful of tabs, next to that is a pinkish bar that will have a Red circle, indicating that there is an issue. phped_error.jpg