Recover From Google Mobile Pop-Up Penalty - Jan 2017
- SEO |
Hi
1) I run a few high traffic blogs which get nearly 85% of their traffic from organic search and almost 70%+ of mobile users.
2) Over the past 6 days, the traffic to one of my blogs has dipped by nearly 45%, I've been investigating this dip and I noticed that a majority of the dip was from mobile traffic, the proportion of mobile traffic to my site had dipped from 79% to 71%, but at the same time, the proportion of my desktop traffic had increased by a few percentage points.
3) With the data collected, I was able to diagnose that the problem might be due to the Google Interstitial Penalty which came into effect on 10th Jan 2017.
4) I had removed all pop-ups and interstitials long before the deadline, but on this particular site, the 'related posts' widget was showing up above-the-fold for mobile users, forcing them to scroll down in order to read the main content.
5) Until now, I was under the impression that this penalty applied only to those displaying intrusive ads and popups on mobile, which hampers user experience but had no idea that Google requires the main content to be displayed above the fold.
6) I have already made the required changes, and the reader can access the main content immediately after the site loads, without having to scroll or perform any other action.
7) But what I am worried about now is the process to get my site traffic back to normal. There is no message or notification in Google Webmasters Tools, so I can't figure out any way to send it over for reconsideration.
Is there anything else I should do or should I just wait and watch for now? I'm really confused at the moment.
It would be great if any of you can offer some advice or share your own experiences with this penalty so that I can plan out my future course of action.
Regards
1) I run a few high traffic blogs which get nearly 85% of their traffic from organic search and almost 70%+ of mobile users.
2) Over the past 6 days, the traffic to one of my blogs has dipped by nearly 45%, I've been investigating this dip and I noticed that a majority of the dip was from mobile traffic, the proportion of mobile traffic to my site had dipped from 79% to 71%, but at the same time, the proportion of my desktop traffic had increased by a few percentage points.
3) With the data collected, I was able to diagnose that the problem might be due to the Google Interstitial Penalty which came into effect on 10th Jan 2017.
4) I had removed all pop-ups and interstitials long before the deadline, but on this particular site, the 'related posts' widget was showing up above-the-fold for mobile users, forcing them to scroll down in order to read the main content.
5) Until now, I was under the impression that this penalty applied only to those displaying intrusive ads and popups on mobile, which hampers user experience but had no idea that Google requires the main content to be displayed above the fold.
6) I have already made the required changes, and the reader can access the main content immediately after the site loads, without having to scroll or perform any other action.
7) But what I am worried about now is the process to get my site traffic back to normal. There is no message or notification in Google Webmasters Tools, so I can't figure out any way to send it over for reconsideration.
Is there anything else I should do or should I just wait and watch for now? I'm really confused at the moment.
It would be great if any of you can offer some advice or share your own experiences with this penalty so that I can plan out my future course of action.
Regards