Potential SEO Issue with Mobile Redirect

Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately the screenshots don’t tell us too much other than an increase in mobile performance as you mention.

While there seem less URLs overall in the desktop dashboard this may be as a result of some of your URLs having less traffic as previously gained during the displayed period, with not enough recent data on those URLs in question.

You’ll find a similar topic was raised in the Search Console Help Center below:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/72263536?hl=en

Note also the mobile direction shouldn’t impact any traffic or reporting for the desktop version of your site.

Thanks. I’ve disabled mobile redirection for now and I’ll see what happens in the next couple of weeks.

Update: So after disabling mobile redirect for a couple of days, the number of pages listed in the mobile and desktop parts of Core Web Vitals has shot up again.

https://jobs.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Core-Web-Vitals-disable-Mobile-Redirect.jpg

Thanks for the update. Unfortunately I don’t have a site with the same traffic in reader mode from which to check with but let me check this with the team.

In the meantime as you’re using an AMP compatible theme have you tried transitional mode with mobile redirection enabled? It might be interesting to share any additional findings while I look into this.

@cnxsoft Were you using the default redirection method where JavaScript is used to do the redirection? In other words, were you using the amp_mobile_client_side_redirection filter to turn off client-side redirection to use server-side redirection instead? If so, one possibility could be that any caching layers were serving mobile results to desktop visitors.

Also, were you using the AMP Legacy Reader theme or did you pick one of the newly-available themes for Reader mode?

When you turned off Mobile Redirection, did the Sitelinks start to increase?

And by “Sitelinks” did you click on Index > Coverage?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Weston Ruter.

Transitional mode currently looks awful on a mobile device. I plan to do this, but I will take time as I need to make modifications to the theme.

I’m using Reader Mode with AMP legacy. I just use the “mobile direction” toggle in the dashboard.
https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Reader-AMP-Legacy-Redirect-Mobile-Off.jpg

Sitelinks did not recover, and instead further plunged.
https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/sitelinks-plunge.jpg

Index coverage looks stable.
https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Index-Coverage.jpg

Do you have mobile-first indexing on your site? Is your primary crawler “Smartphone”?

Where are you finding “Sitelinks” in Google Search Console? I don’t see that in my site’s Search Console.

The reason that your Sitelinks may be diminishing when you have Mobile Redirection enabled is that the AMP Legacy templates for Reader mode lack a nav menu. Perhaps this is why Sitelinks are not being discovered when you have mobile redirection enabled.

What if you try selecting a Reader theme other than Legacy? It will allow you to have a nav menu and other standard features of theme templates.

Yes, correct my website is mobile-first indexing.

In the enhancement area, I have a “Sitelinks searchbox” section.
https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/sitelinks-searchbox.jpg

As noted above, it’s not going up even after I disable mobile redirect, so the Sitelinks issue may not be related to the mobile redirection at all, unless there’s a longer lag than in Core Web Vitals.

I could select another Reader theme, but I’d have to create a child theme first to integrate the ads.So it will take some time.

Just an update saying that I’ve made some inquiries about whether there is a mobile redirection implementation problem in the AMP plugin. I’ll update this when I have more information.

Just an update on my side as well. The Sitelinks search drop was an issue with another structured data plugin. So the mobile redirect only impacted the number of pages shown in Web Core Vitals.

Maybe it’s because, as you pointed out, of the link structure between WPTouch mobile theme and the legacy reader theme that pages started to disappear in Web Core Vitals. I can’t explain why this impacted the desktop website more though.