alexp
Newbie
Hope to get some advice to help me make a decision here.
It goes like this: client ecom site redirected the main category page to new URL roughly 6 months ago. The page has been suffering in SERPs ever since, going from top of page 1 to bottom, and nowadays to page 2.
Sidenote: The change in the URL was just 1 letter, from singular to plural, which seemed more logical to the site admins. This came together with a reorganization of children categories and a setup of respective URL redirects. The child categories are doing fine in SERPs, the main one not.
Coming back to the main URL issue -
Looking in GSC, there still are indexed:
- the old URL
- several variations of the old URL with parameters (filters)
Bottom line: some 8 instances of the old page are still indexed with variant URLs, and all of them report the Google-selected canonical to be the Inspected URL.
The User-declared canonical is correctly reported to be the new URL, but is not selected.
A bit of necessary background: in the months before the main URL's redirect, we had an issue caused by upgrading to the pro version of the popular SEO plugin (Yoa..). Turned out it conflicted with the custom theme, and made the canonicals go haywire site-wide. (if you're curious: the paginations got . Google went crazy with multiple and conflicting versions of each product category being indexed and the site tanked in serps. That's probably why it's still keeping variants of the old URL still indexed with self-referencing canonicals.
I've kept manually submitting all these left-over URLs for re-indexation for the past 2 weeks, but I can't even get google to change the Last crawl date.
All internal links to the old URL were updated on the website about a month ago (late, I know), so all are pointing to the new URL. Also, the old URL has got many external links.
I am tempted at this point to switch back to the old URL, but this will probably send all child categories into resettling. And who knows whether it will even fix the main category?
If you got to read this long piece, I'm looking forward to getting your opinion!
It goes like this: client ecom site redirected the main category page to new URL roughly 6 months ago. The page has been suffering in SERPs ever since, going from top of page 1 to bottom, and nowadays to page 2.
Sidenote: The change in the URL was just 1 letter, from singular to plural, which seemed more logical to the site admins. This came together with a reorganization of children categories and a setup of respective URL redirects. The child categories are doing fine in SERPs, the main one not.
Coming back to the main URL issue -
Looking in GSC, there still are indexed:
- the old URL
- several variations of the old URL with parameters (filters)
Bottom line: some 8 instances of the old page are still indexed with variant URLs, and all of them report the Google-selected canonical to be the Inspected URL.
The User-declared canonical is correctly reported to be the new URL, but is not selected.
A bit of necessary background: in the months before the main URL's redirect, we had an issue caused by upgrading to the pro version of the popular SEO plugin (Yoa..). Turned out it conflicted with the custom theme, and made the canonicals go haywire site-wide. (if you're curious: the paginations got . Google went crazy with multiple and conflicting versions of each product category being indexed and the site tanked in serps. That's probably why it's still keeping variants of the old URL still indexed with self-referencing canonicals.
I've kept manually submitting all these left-over URLs for re-indexation for the past 2 weeks, but I can't even get google to change the Last crawl date.
All internal links to the old URL were updated on the website about a month ago (late, I know), so all are pointing to the new URL. Also, the old URL has got many external links.
I am tempted at this point to switch back to the old URL, but this will probably send all child categories into resettling. And who knows whether it will even fix the main category?
If you got to read this long piece, I'm looking forward to getting your opinion!
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