-
Impact Of “Validating” A Fix In Search Console/Mobile Usability
Howdy, y’all – I’ve got a Search Console question. (TL;DR: Does validating fixes do anything?)
**Background:**
Around Aug. 2022, I noticed that Google Search Console was saying ALL of our pages were now failing Mobile Usability standards. I had a developer “fix” the pages (ie make the text pretty big on mobile, make the viewport the right size, etc.). After about two weeks, 1/2 of the pages passed. The other 1/2 failed. No rhyme or reason behind why one passed while the other failed – they use the same theme, content blocks, and everything.
The Internet told me not to worry about it because it’s just a vanity metric. “Google doesn’t actually pay attention to it.” That, or Google just “didn’t have the resources to index the full page – you’re fine.” Well, we dropped in the rankings. Went from #3 to about #7 in a hyper-competitive industry (Plastic Surgery/Aesthetic services).
Note: Outside of Mobile Usability being a “vanity” metric, there was this goofy thing that started happening where – if you held down on the mobile page with your finger – you could slide the page around. Probably not great.
**The Reddit Fix:**
Some dude/life-saver posted a code on an older post that essentially tells Google “yeah, all this stuff is actually fine.” It also solved the weird dragging issue I mentioned above.
**The Issue:**
I resubmitted the sitemap & asked Google to “Validate” all of my fixes on Oct. 25, 2022. It has been 15 days with no movement.
However, any new page I publish automatically gets put in the “passing” column AND when I test the Live URL of pages that weren’t passing on Oct. 19, 2022, they’re showing as passing. Meanwhile, Search Console just says “Validation Started – Looking Good.”
I’m hurtin’ over here.
**My Questions:**
* Have you all “validated” fixes in batches like this before?
* How many pages did you try to do at once? (I’m at 110 pages for two different errors)
* How long did it take?
* **And here’s the big one** \- once approved, did it impact your Organic Search traffic/rankings at all? -
1 Reply
-
I’ll go out on a limb and say the reason for rankings changing has nothing to do with this. I’d read the quality raters guidelines and the content Google has on the recent updates for some thoughts, especially for medical content like that.
For indexing issues, “validate fix” helps to speed up recrawling. For everything else, it’s more about giving you information on what’s happening, to let you know if your changes had any effect. There’s no “the website fixed it, let’s release the hand brake” effect from this, it’s really primarily for you: you said it was good now, and here is what Google found.
-
As someone said above the fix option is for you really as I don’t even click it when I’ve fixed the issues and just leave it and it will eventually update on its own so the fix button does nothing as far as I’m aware
It’s not likely this is the reason your competitor passed you
Log in to reply.