Does anyone care to guess why a couple of my friends' sites rank #1 on mobile but nowhere on desktop? Been going on for around 3 months now. Seems odd, CWV for 100% for both mobile and desktop.
not2easy
6:15 pm on Sep 12, 2022 (gmt 0)
If there are mostly mobile visitors already, that may be why a site would rank better for mobile search. Google needs desktop traffic to decide how desktop users like (or don't) a site. What do you see in GSC when evaluating CWV for desktop? You may see a message, something about Chrome needing more desktop visits to decide.
Sgt_Kickaxe
7:45 pm on Sep 12, 2022 (gmt 0)
I literally just had to help resolve this issue with/for a friend this week. Without seeing your site I can't diagnose it but I'll share this in case it gives you ideas.
Important - The mobile and desktop indexes are different, according to Google, so you might have an issue in both but only one is ignoring pages. Keep that in mind.
What was happening on my friend's site was query canabalization by category pages. You can see if that's a current problem on your site in two ways.
#1 - Look in search console, go to the search results > pages report, find the category pages. Open each up and switch to the Queries tab to see what, if anything, they received impressions for. Click on each query and switch back to pages. You can confirm cannabalization if more than one page appears.
#2 - This method is less time consuming but only gives a current snapshot, not one over time. Load up the category page in search console, switch to queries and Google them one by one on desktop and mobile. If you see your category page ranked 10-50 on desktop but an actual page ranked top 3 on mobile you have cannabalization going on.
What happens is that individual articles or product pages tend to rank well for specific queries but a category page will rank lower, often out of the top 10 results and will feel like it's not indexed unless you look deeper into the results.
A fix - there are several so use the right one, this one worked for us nicely but would be bad on an ecommerce site. Noindex the category pages. Google will still crawl them, find the pages linked on it, pass "juice" etc but will not rank them and so they cannot keep a good page down.
A less brutal method of fixing it would be to add more articles to the first page of the category and to interlink the pages in it a little more to pass perceived importance to the pages, away from the category page.
Good luck!
edit: The method we used worked but is not without issues. Google will stop looking at noindexed pages as frequently over time which can be a problem for quickly updating category pages. YMMV.
saladtosser
8:32 am on Sep 14, 2022 (gmt 0)
Thanks for the detailed replies and help, guys, but I found the problem. The problem was the site was a 100% AMP site (desktop and mobile versions), and although it used to rank fine on desktop and mobile #1 it stopped. I removed the amp tag, and its back on desktop and mobile now. Looks like google is now penalising 100% AMP sites on the desktop....
