Rankings Drop After Mobile Usability Fail?
Google’s John Mueller explains why fixing an issue flagged in search console didn’t help a site regain search visibility
Google’s John Mueller responded to a Reddit SEO discussion where a search console warning about mobile usability was soon after followed by a rankings drop in a medical related website.
The timing of the drop in rankings happening soon after search console issued a warning about mobile usability issues made the two events appear to be related.
The person despaired because they fixed the problem, validated the fix through Google search console but the rankings changes haven’t reversed.
Understanding Changes in Ranking
John Mueller responded in the Reddit discussion, observing that in his opinion the mobile usability issues were unrelated to the rankings drop.
This is a great example of how the most obvious reason for something happening is not always the correct reason, it’s only the most obvious.
Obvious is not the same as accurate or correct, even though it might seem like it.
When diagnosing a problem it’s important to keep an open mind about the causes and to not stop diagnosing an issue at the first more obvious explanation.
John dismissed the mobile usability issue as being serious enough to affect rankings.
His answer suggested that serious content quality issues are a likelier reason for a rankings change, especially if the change happens around the same time as an algorithm update.
The Google Raters Guidelines are a guide for assessing site quality in an objective manner, free of subjective ideas of what constitutes site quality.
So it makes sense that Mueller suggested to the Redditor that they should read the raters guidelines to see if the descriptions of what defines site quality matches those of the site in question.
Coincidentally, Google recently published new documentation for helping publishers understand what Google considers rank-worthy content.
The document is called, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. The documentation contains a section that’s relevant to this problem, Get to know E-A-T and the quality rater guidelines.
Google’s help page explains that their algorithm uses many factors to understand whether a webpage is expert, authoritative and trustworthy, particularly for Your Money Your Life pages such as those on medical topics.