Branded Product Dropping from 1st position. Why?
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Hi All,
I have a branded product that's always ranked 1st. It's a popular product which attracts the majority of our website's traffic. Now it's suddenly dropped from 1st to 20th. Can anyone advise me why this has happened? I've made no radical changes in the last month.
keyword: Wattbike Atom Url:https://wattbike.com/gb/product/atom
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It's because Google believes that your page doesn't sell the product (which makes the page dramatically less useful) which is due to them crawling your site and caching pages from the wrong data centre (apparently somewhere in Australia!?)
Check it out. Here's your beautiful page:
Look how beautiful and useful it is, with the ability to buy the product and with all that nice content:
Now let's look at Google's cache of the page:
You can clearly see in that above link, we're querying Google's cache of the "gb" version of the page (%2Fgb%2Fproduct).
But how weird is this? It's cached the AU page 'as' the GB page ,which states to Google that the product isn't available to buy:
Uh - what Google!? Are you high? Why have you cached the AU page as the EN/GB page. I bet you any money, that has a huge amount to do with this.
I reckon' you've got regional redirects installed which snatch up users and force them into their own region's version of the site / page - unless a user manually uses the flag to change their location. Seems like good UX right? And it is, but don't apply the same logic to Google
Exempt Googlebot from your regional redirects if you have any (do it via user-agent based .htaccess / web.config exclusion, your dev will know what that means!)
You may find that by doing this, Search Console starts giving you more error reports in other areas. That's because you will have lifted a veil that has been cloaking certain issues underneath of redirects (leap that hurdle when you come to it)
Either you have a Google caching bug on your hands, or they deployed the wrong data centre to cache your URL, and that's when the redirects bork'd everything. IMO, that's what it is
Even if this isn't 100% accurate it will be enough to get a good dev-tective sniffing
Hope that helps...
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Happy to help! Good luck!
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Thanks, John, I'll follow your steps and keep you updated. Fingers crossed its nothing sitewide. All our other keywords are performing normally.
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Hey Thomas,
I'm stumped on this one. Your inner link count looks good (358) as well as external link profile to that page. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Add exact keyword to
2. Add exact keyword to
3. Review Google Pagespeed insights data: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwattbike.com%2Fgb%2Fproduct%2Fatom
4. Review the schema structure on product pages: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwattbike.com%2Fgb%2Fproduct%2Fatom
5. Review 404 errors in Search Console
You normally don't see this type of drop unless there's a bigger issue going on related to the entire site. I hope that helps!
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