WordPress Mobile Pack (WMP) is a plugin for WordPress platform. It quickly and easily make a WP blog accessible on mobile devices. With more and more people using Internet on mobile devices, it is not hard to guess why webmasters want to make their websites accessible on devices like smart phones and tablets. If the WP theme you are using is not a responsive theme –you may face a bit of trouble in seeing your website properly on such on-the-go internet devices. But installing WMP easily solves this problem.
HOWEVER, don’t jump with joy! Although the makers of this plugin did a good job but their plugin design has a very serious flaw. We installed WordPress Mobile Pack on TechWelkin about a year ago and soon after our search traffic began to sink. WMP was found to be one of the major reasons for such a drastic decline in traffic coming from search engines –especially from Google.
WMP comes with a minimalist theme that is designed to be responsive on different types of devices. When a user requests a page from your website, this plugin detects whether the page requesting device is a computer or a mobile device. If it founds to be a mobile devices, post data is sent with WMP theme and your post appears all well on user’s mobile phone or tablet. If the requesting device is a computer the normal version of your website is shown to the user.
The problem is that WMP creates duplicate URLs for accessing the same content. Duplicate content is a cardinal sin in the eyes of Google (all the more after Panda update made in February 2011).
As mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Panda update, Google says it only takes a few poor quality, or duplicate content, pages to hold down traffic on an otherwise solid site.
WMP creates at least one more URL for each of your post, pages, categories, archives etc.
If your website had, say, 100 URLs indexed in Google; after WMP installation –Google will have at least 200 URLs in its index. This attracts a heavy penalty from Google and your website’s search ranking falls significantly.
As soon as you install WMP –your site becomes neatly accessible on mobile phones but you’ll have to pay a very heavy price for this facility. It is not worth losing search traffic coming from Google.
First of all, you should consider removing WMP plug-in. We have written an article about how to remove WMP plug-in. Instead of a mobile plugin, you should invest in making your website responsive so that the same website could be seen on all kinds of devices without any problem. This is the ideal solution.
Having a responsive WP Theme is a better deal and solution and is a must these days …