Not all mobile traffic is good traffic
Shaun Barriball discusses crawler and Google experiences
Most brands would be pleased to see a healthy increase in their monthly page impression total – but be aware not all traffic is good traffic. Make sure you qualify where that traffic has come from – is it from mobile devices, is it coming from servers that look to be operator/carrier networks or wifi hotspots, are the usage patterns consistent with real users.
We’ve recently had a couple of examples where our traffic monitoring techniques highlighted bad traffic. In the simplest case we saw traffic from what eventually proved to be a crawler bot pretending to be a real mobile device, discernible only through detailed review of the source servers and some small aspects of the user agent. Crawler traffic which is not identified as such is bad for many reasons including its skewing of site stats especially with respect to uniques and impressions per visit. Methods of proactively detecting crawlers quickly is essential for any modern mobile content platform.
In a more concerning case we identified that a number of our larger newspaper publisher sites had seen a large increase in traffic from PC browsers, referred by Google and Google News. An investigation proved that mobile sites such as timesmobile.mobi were competing with their website equivalents, in the normal Google web results. In some cases the mobile sites out ranked the web sites due to SEO work employed by us to make the mobile site more successful. This scenario was bad for many reasons including the user experience for PC users and the overall ranking of the content due to Googles duplicate content penalties (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359). The hypothesis is that there had been a recent change in the policy in Google’s secret algorithm to cause this behaviour. Previously content submitted via the mobile sitemap submissions was limited to the mobile web result listings only. This appeared to highlight some deficiencies with Googles sitemap submission process for mobile which we eventually got to the bottom of (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2914cbce50419d89&hl=en).
In summary, know your traffic as not all traffic is good traffic.
