Sudden issue: no google cache for any product detail pages and offer schema missing from SERPS

[jamestown]

Absolutely no idea what is going on. All of our category / subcategory and other support pages are indexed and cached as normal, but suddenly none of our product pages are cached, and all of the product / offer schema snippets have been dropped from the serps as well (price, review count, average rating etc).

When I inspect a product detail page url in GSC, I am either getting errors or it is returned as a soft 404. There have been no recent changes to our website that are obvious culprits. When I request indexing, it works fine for non-product pages, but generates the "Something went wrong
If the issue persists, try again in a few hours" message for any product page submitted.

We are not SEO novices. This is an Angular 7 site with a Universal version launched back in October (new site, same domain), and until this strange issue cropped up we'd enjoyed steady improvement of rankings and GSC technical issues. Has anyone seen anything like this?

We are seeing rapid deterioration in rankings overnight for all product detail pages due to this issue. A term / page combination that ranked for over a decade in the top 10 lost 10 places overnight...

There's just no obvious culprit. Using chrome dev tools to view as googlebot, everything is kosher. No weird redirects, no errors, returns 200 and page loads.

Thank You

[lobor]

I am facing problem with one of my website where google is caching the page when checked using cache: operator but displaying a 404 msg in the body of the cached version.
But when i check the same in 'text-only version' the complete content and element is visible to Google and also GSC shows the page with no issue and rendering is also fine.
The canonicals and robots are properly set with no issues on them.
Not able to figure out what is the problem. Experts advice would help!

Regards

[jamestown]

Still no root cause detected. Also strange, starting May 21, sudden and steady decline in # of product detail pages with valid product schema. No recent production changes that would impacted that. From ~3,000 to ~300 pages with valid product schema. Seems suspicious timing with sudden lack of cached pages. Again, only impacting product detail pages.

The way the site works, any googlebot is directed to the html version. The only way this wouldn't fly is if google has some new user agents with very strange names. Could that be the case?

[jamestown]

@blueprintmarketing Hi Tom. Thank you - email sent!

[BlueprintMarketing]

@jamestown
It sounds strange.
I can crawl it but it might be angular (something failing on the server rendering.)

I would be happy to look if you want to send me the domain. You can email me if you like.

https://blog.angular-university.io/angular-2-universal-meet-the-internet-of-the-future-seo-friendly-single-page-web-apps/

Hope this helps,
Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

This post is deleted!

[terentyev]

@jamestown
First, I assume, you checked x-robots-tag headers, robots.txt and robots meta tags, to make sure they are all not including "noindex".
Second, I also assume that you have already checked if your CDN or caching does not block search bot traffic, which can cause such issues.
Third, check your product pages with JS turned off - this can uncover some issues with rendering.

From your description, it seems that Google cannot access the product pages for some unknown reason. These issues are quite hard to investigate, especially on large sites, like yours. What I can suggest is to add multiple properties on Google Search Console on your /product/ folder (or whatever folder name you use). And also, go even more granular, by adding some product categories folders, to check if the issue is consistent across the whole page type.

I am sorry, I cannot provide you with a magic bullet for this issue, but I hope I have given you enough clues to proceed with your investigation. Good luck!