I stopped using Mobilepress about a couple of months ago after sticking with the plugin for over 3 years. I loved it and it was hard saying goodbye but I had to do it. If you’ve been a regular visitor here, you would notice before I completely switched to this responsive design, I had a fully customized Mobilepress theme with loads of features you wouldn’t find in the plugin by default.
A lot of work was put into it but then, I had to let it go.
The Problems with Mobilepress
The number one issue with this great mobile plugin for WordPress is that it isn’t search engine optimized. As a matter of fact, it almost completely killed this blog. I’ll further break this down for you to understand what I mean.
1. The issue of duplicate posts
I talked extensively about dealing with internal duplicate posts issues on WordPress in this article but that didn’t even save me because the damage was done already… and it was a pretty, big heavy damage. Mobilepress duplicates your posts and you may end up finding unwanted URL parameters in Google Webmaster tools. Parameters like ?mobile, ?nomobile and ?comment=true will be added to your posts and once Google picks these up, you’ll be having loads of duplicate URLs indexed.
Getting penalized for this may be a nightmare and render your on-page SEO efforts useless. I’ve been there.
2. Absence of the canonical tag
This tag is important, it is very important and by default, WordPress automatically adds it to your head section. In case a post is accessible through different URLs or there’s a www version and a non-www version of your website, this tag tells bots which URL is preferred.
Unfortunately, this tag is absent in Mobilepress and can cause problems.
3. SEO Meta tags are all missing
Using Yoast SEO plugin or All-in-One SEO? Chances are that those meta tags are all absent on your mobile site. One may argue that they’re not needed since they’re available on the full site but maybe we need to be reminded that Google now takes mobile optimization seriously.
Still Sticking With MobilePress? Your Call!
I used to prefer dedicated mobile sites over responsive design but given what I experienced using Mobilepress, I don’t think I’m ever going back. Knowing that whatever change I make to the site would be effected on the full site and mobile site minimizes the work that has to be done.
I got penalized for duplicate content content, lost a good amount of traffic, tried making right my wrongs, then eventually switched to responsive design. You don’t wanna go that road, trust me.
If you’re still gonna use this plugin, make sure the three problems listed up there are fixed. If you can’t, I guess you know what to do.
