Has google changed mobile search algorithm?

[*james*]

have noticed a drop in traffic recently and looking at http://www.google.com/xhtml (http://www.google.com/xhmtl) it seems that mobile sites have been downgraded in terms of ranking in favour of web based sites.

This happened before when they merged mobile and web search but mobile sites seem to have been further downgraded? Any views?

[NewBizInDisney]

Fixed your Link.

http://www.google.com/xhtml

[Work In Progress]

I haven't seen much difference myself. Both Google and Yahoo mobile search results don't make much sense to me. They both will often show non-mobile related sites above mobile sites. :dontknow:

But it's real early in the game. I'm sure they'll be tweaking for years to get things right

[*james*]

hmm - we've added some meta tags incorrectly apparently so that might account for our problems.

It does seem a joke though that when you search for ringtones on google mobile they give you a load of web sites when there's loads of mobile ones out there.

[Gerry]

bizarre. I had never seen that before.

I rank exceptionally higher on Google.com than this gizmo.

For now, early in the game, I will take that as a compliment.

[Work In Progress]

bizarre. I had never seen that before.

I rank exceptionally higher on Google.com than this gizmo.

For now, early in the game, I will take that as a compliment.
Agreed. I'd rather have the full google audience for the time being. Let's us introduce regular surfers to our mobi world :smile:

[wex]

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-google-search-results-pages-for.html bad times for mobility :)?

[NewBizInDisney]

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-google-search-results-pages-for.html bad times for mobility :)?If they choose not to support it within their own name, that's their business, their choosing.

Life goes on.

[Gerry]

Well, something is going on.

My iCPR.mobi was ranked as high as number 11 on google.com for search iCPR and now it is not in the top 100.

I think one way to counter this is to have .com sites as portals and filled with links to our sites. That seems to be working. Actually, that is how I found Berry Review. It is a .com with .mobi links.

Or it could be a glitch because raced.mobi still is 32 on google.

There are ways of beating this I believe. Think, "oops, how did that .com get in my metatags?"

[wex]

Older discussion http://mobility.mobi/showthread.php?t=5864

Kyle
Feb 3rd, 2008 at 3:03 am

This change hurt my site... Ad's down by -300% !!...

[newdomainer]

I don't know how much impact this may have (it was news to me but maybe not to anyone else ;-)

At the dotmobi / London meet - Ami mentioned that brand new 'mobile sites' stand a lot better chance of being rated as 'mobile friendly' by the search engines if they are dotmobi rather than autodetect dotcoms etc..

Reason being that any dotcom(etc) site has already been tagged by the bots so if they build a mobile site and have it as an m. etc.. the search already knows that url as a 'normal' site... whereas a dotmobi is not using a sub-domain etc. and is therefore tagged very clearly as a 'small screen' / mobile / dotmobi site... that struck a chord with me because it is a good USP that dotmobi have... and should be built upon!

[Gerry]

Older discussion http://mobility.mobi/showthread.php?t=5864
Wex,

At the beginning of the year Google changed their algorithm.

What that article basically is referring to is those changes that occured at the beginning of the year where static pages were no longer being ranked as high.

Google felt that many of the searches ended up on "historical" or info sites like Wikipedia and customers ended up going 4-6 pages deep.

So pages that had dynamic content and fresh content were given priority under the new algorithm at the beginning of the year.

Google had silently been testing this in mid December.

And they silently implemented this without much fanfare at all.

Many saw their PPC drop drastically. That is why parking is not the best option anymore.

Pages need to be constantly updating whether through blogging or feeds.

What ever the recent changes are perhaps just a new trial.

Who knows. But I do know the date of the previous post refers to what I mentioned had happened.

[wex]

The disscusion is why google is giving priority for transcoded web pages rather than mobile pages?

[*james*]

The disscusion is why google is giving priority for transcoded web pages rather than mobile pages?

yes - they seem to have FURTHER downgraded mobile pages.

[newdomainer]

Wex,

At the beginning of the year Google changed their algorithm.

What that article basically is referring to is those changes that occured at the beginning of the year where static pages were no longer being ranked as high.

Google felt that many of the searches ended up on "historical" or info sites like Wikipedia and customers ended up going 4-6 pages deep.

So pages that had dynamic content and fresh content were given priority under the new algorithm at the beginning of the year.

Google had silently been testing this in mid December.

And they silently implemented this without much fanfare at all.

Many saw their PPC drop drastically. That is why parking is not the best option anymore.

Pages need to be constantly updating whether through blogging or feeds.

What ever the recent changes are perhaps just a new trial.

Who knows. But I do know the date of the previous post refers to what I mentioned had happened.


Hi Gerry

What is a good way of circumventing this problem where you have a site that is, by design... fairly static (e.g a business profile site with contact details)?

Could you improve the situation by simply adding an RSS feed? or would it take more than that to push you up the ranks?

[mediaadvantages]

It is true that google just did this. Article came out today and tells people to go to google.com.

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-google-search-results-pages-for.html

Two weeks ago we updated our mobile homepage (http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/06/mobile-search-access-gets-faster.html) in the US so that it would load more quickly. Today, we're releasing in the US a number of improvements to our mobile search results pages for BlackBerry browsers. These new improvements are designed to help you find the information you want more easily.


Improved comprehensiveness: Our mobile search now incorporates results from Product Search, Blog Search, News archives search, and more.
Blended results: Instead of showing you web, image, local and news results in separate sections, we now combine them to improve relevance. We've also made it easier for you to focus your search on any one of these categories -- notice how the links are now placed at the top of the results page.
Longer snippets: Web results include longer snippets so that your answer may be right on the results page.
Related searches: At the bottom of the search results page, you'll find a list of related searches to help you refine a query.
You may notice that many of these improvements mirror our desktop search capabilities. We have taken desktop elements that have tested well on mobile and further optimized them for the mobile use case. Improving mobile search is a continuous process and we hope you find the releases this past month to move the needle on what we care most about: quality, speed and ease of use.

To watch a demo of our new mobile search results pages, take a peek at the video below. Or better yet, test drive our new search results page yourself. It's simple. Go to google.com on your BlackBerry browser and search away!

[Gerry]

Hi Gerry

What is a good way of circumventing this problem where you have a site that is, by design... fairly static (e.g a business profile site with contact details)?

Could you improve the situation by simply adding an RSS feed? or would it take more than that to push you up the ranks?Yes. A news feed or a feed regarding your industry news or updates would help.

I am not an SEO expert and won't pretend to be but I know what works for me.

There are feeds out there that for nearly every facet of life and industry. And there are also feed generators to create the feed on your own.

The keys now appear to be dynamic content (feeds, blogging, etc), links, and meta tags or tags in general along with proper keywords.

The content MUST be relevant to be effective.

And I have found what might be a distinct advantage in using Joomla.

The site itself can be keyworded and metatagged.

Each page can be keyworded and metatagged and include links to other pages within sites or external.

Each link I create has a capability of having it own description, links, keywords and metatags.

And each image can have its own keywords, description, links, and metatags.

In other words, each page within the site can essentially contain hundreds of links to itself!

This may seem crazy but it does appear to be effective.

How else would raced.mobi appear on google at number 34 out of 11,600,000 for raced. This is not for the extension but the generic word raced. It does not matter if it is horse racing, nascar, olympic qualifying, formula one...this is currently sitting at number 34 - raced.mobi.

Now, many of my sites do get bounced around quite a bit and pretty regularly. There is no rhyme or reason to this. One day iCPR.mobi is 35, then 11, then nowhere to be found, and then back in the top 20.

So I guess I need to spend more time and go back into some of my earlier sites and do some more optimizing.

It is all a learning process and ever evolving. I am not trying to push Joomla onto anyone as it is reportedly more difficult than other Open Source such as Drupal and WordPress. And I am certainly no Joomla expert.

[wex]

Google Updates its Mobile Web Index !!!!
http://www.seoprinciple.com/mobile-seo-google-updates-its-mobile-web-index/23/#comment-47983

[Nadir]

There's been a major update in Google's Mobile Web Index. It now has less crap and duplicates. By crap I mean WML version of forum pages, or random .edu pages.

Google now seems to finally reward mobile sites based on their links and content.

Actually, I should say reward PC sites that have a mobile version...

Indeed, the major change is that in the mobile web index, it now lists desktop PC sites that have a mobile counterpart.

Take some random key words and see by yourself:

http://www.google.com/m?eosr=on&q=ringtones&site=mobile&sa=X&oi=blended&ct=more-results

or

http://www.google.com/m/search?eosr=on&mrestrict=xhtml&q=games&btnMobile=Search

It's mostly traditional websites, but that are mobile friendly either because they're well coded, or because they redirect mobile visitors to a mobile version.

I believe Google decided to go that way because mobile sites generally don't have much content or few (sometimes zero) links. So it's hard to define the relevancy of such pages.

It now basically favors websites that also have a mobile version, rather than mobile only sites.

Your best bet to get traffic from Google Mobile is then to spend more time SEOing your PC website rather than your mobile site (how ironic is that).

[noonoo1]

thats very interesting news indeed, thanks.

[setjmp]

Thanks for the info. Seems reality makes sense :-D

[Tim]

I see nary a .mobi in the first 100 pages for almost anything. I think it has everything to do with content and value. There is just not enough of that in .mobi even after 2 years.

[*james*]

>Your best bet to get traffic from Google Mobile is then to spend more time SEOing >your PC website rather than your mobile site (how ironic is that).

Great post Nadir - sums it up nicely - we have a mobile and a PC version and even on mobile searches they will rank a transcoded version of the PC site the highest...

Still Google's inability to rank mobile sites effectively means that there are opportunities for others to do it - that's partly why we created a directory of mobile sites over at mjelly - there was no other way of finding the good ones