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Thanks Jim,  When I said drop that was page rank as I have been tracking through Google Search Console search analytics.  We have an adaptive site that detects the users equipment.  I URLs are the same in both environments.    When I look at desktop the average page rank dropped 4 positions taking us off the front page while the average position on mobile dropped a half a position.  Does that help?  Thanks

Looking at Google Search Analytics page position by device.  The desktop version has seen a dramatic drop in the last 60 days compared to the mobile site.  Could this be caused by mobile first indexing?  Has Google had any releases that might have caused this?

Thank You Chris

Thanks again Chris,

If these items are not parameters, should I do something to them?  Or just leave them alone.

Thanks for the quick response Chris,

I understand what the parameters are for,

My issue is that I am seeing new parameters in the list that I did not enter.  Will Google insert what it thinks are new parameters it finds?

Or does this have to be caused by someone keying these who has access to the Webmaster account?

Jim

I am seeing new parameters added (and sometimes removed) from the URL Parameter tool.  Is there anything that would add parameters to the tool?  Or does it have to be someone internally?

FYI - They always have no date in the configured column, no effect set, and crawl is set to Let Google decide.

I add the product manuals to our product pages to provide additional product information to our customers.  Is this considered duplicate content?  Is there a best way to do this so that I can offer the information to my customers without getting penalized for it?  Should they be indexable?  If not how do I control?

Thank you for your responses!

In GWT I am seeing my mobile site's soft 404 count slowly rise from 5 two weeks ago to over 100 as of today.  If I do nothing I expect it will continue to rise into the thousands.  This is due to there being followed links on external sites to thousands of discontinued products we used to offer.  The landing page for these links simply says the product is no longer available and gives links to related areas of our site.

I know I can address this by returning a 404 for these pages, but doing so will cause these pages to be de-indexed.  Since these pages still have utility in redirecting people to related, available products, I want these pages to stay in the index and so I don't want to return a 404.

Another way of addressing this is to add more useful content to these pages so that Google no longer classifies them as soft 404.  I have images and written content for these pages that I'm not showing right now, but I could show if necessary.

But before investing any time in addressing these soft 404s, does anyone know the real consequences of not addressing them?  Right now I'm getting 275k pages indexed and historically crawl budget has not been an issue on my site, nor have I seen any anomalous crawl activity since the climb in soft 404s began.  Unchecked, the soft 404s could climb to 20,000ish.  I'm wondering if I should start expecting effects on the crawl, and also if domain authority takes a hit when there are that many soft 404s being reported.

Any information is appreciated.

We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same.  User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site.  At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked.

I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well.  Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL.  Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page?

We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it.  Thanks!