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Redirecting on user agent to a mobile site is kinda annoying, but not against Google TOS. Only if you show Googlebot different content than you would show other
by blauwbilgorgel 16y ago
Redirecting on user agent to a mobile site is kinda annoying, but not against Google TOS. Only if you show Googlebot different content than you would show other user agents (single out Googlebot), is it considered cloaking.
You talk of a penalty, where a search engine accessibility issue seems a lot more likely. SE accessibility issues usually translate to all search engines.
Besides that there are a few other possibilities that follow Occam's razor and don't promote the Bing-steals idea. The biggest of these would be trends or market changes. If all around the board you get less people searching for your product (for whatever reason), this should reflect in all search engines' stats.
It's also perfectly possible that an older niche player cleaned up his/her game, or a new competitor hit the scene. Both could eat up your traffic.
Or a webmaster that had many sites linking to you forgot to renew his/her domains.
I don't fault the OP for jumping to conclusions (well, maybe a little bit more care would be appreciated); search engines are a black box, and it is all too easy to connect changes you made on the site, to changes in stats. Even when they are not correlated.
Next time when you encounter a bump and ask yourself: Did I get a penalty? Really try to pinpoint the problem: Which parts of the site took a drop? Does that site still link to me? Is is a trend, and do last year's stats show the same decline? etc. etc.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-oh-i-got-a-penalty http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-oh-i-got-a-pena... can help you with this. Also read up on how to submit a mobile sitemap and have these sites running next to each other without any (perceived) problems: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...
- wladimir 16y agoRedirecting on user agent to a mobile site is kinda annoying Indeed annoying, a few weeks ago with the release of FF4 there were sites that mis-classified the browser as mobile, and redirected you to the mobile site. Usually the mobile site is limited and offers no way to switch to the real thing.
- hung 16y agoThanks for your comment! I actually forgot to show the same mobile content to Googlebot-mobile, so I think that's why they assumed it was cloaking. My site gets pretty consistent traffic. It goes up and down depending on the day of the week and the season but otherwise it's very normal. I am fairly certain that the drop (and now the recovery) has to do with the mobile user agent change I made. The results are now recovering to pre-dip levels, so I don't think it could be something else. The comments on this post are really illuminating. Thanks for sharing. This is why I really love HN.