Random important product pages dropped out of index week ending Dec 22: why???

[jamestown]

Hello

We've been around a very long time, and I have a long running pet set of core terms and pages tracked using Moz and other tools.  With no changes to the content or site or htaaccess or robots.txt or sitemap, insignificant backlink changes etc, we saw a ton of important product pages drop out of the index the week ending December 22 2019.  We are still ranking for many of the terms associated, but at far worse positions since the pages G is choosing instead for those terms are not as focused. I need to be clear that this has not happened across the board, but seemingly at random.

When I look in G Search Console, the pages are  submitted and indexed (last crawl yesterday), mobile friendly, have breadcrumbs, and the only warning are product level for lack of optional fields under offers (nothing new, not particular to the dropped pages in question here).

So, what happened the week ending December 22???? Should I expect the dust to settle and the pages to return? Extremely strange.

Thx

[effectdigital]

That very much sounds like, for some reason Google has gone from viewing that particular page template as "decent, worthy of rankings" to "ok, will rank if I can't find something better". One thing I am wondering, if you have been hit by this: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/google-review-stars-drop-by-14-percent

... which is also related to this:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful.html

Specifically where they say "Self-serving reviews aren't allowed for LocalBusiness and Organization. Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren't in the best interest of users. We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A - either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget. That’s why, with this change, we’re not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types LocalBusiness and Organization"

It seems as if 'something' existed on your product detail pages which Google was valuing highly, which they no longer value at all. Thus you aren't seeing complete drop-off, but a high correlation between declining (or removed) results and pages utilising that feature

Basically self-hosted reviews and some embedded reviews 'no longer count' towards Google rankings (at all). The news broke in September 2019, but I wouldn't be surprised if the roll-out was more recent. Moz posted that they noticed movements on Sept 24, which is very nearly November. As we know, these types of updates tend to slowly crawl across Google's query-spaces, it's not often true that everyone gets hit at once

Maybe your site is just in the late batch

[jamestown]

Hi

Thanks. Yeah, the thing here is not just a rank decline, it is the page dropped from the index altogether. Google instead choosing a different page from our site to rank for the same terms, but at a lesser position. Confirmed  page dropped using site: www.domain.com searches. This is an ecommerce site with some 5,000 distinct product pages. We are not new, we've been around with an ecommerce site since 1997. The current site has existed in current for ~14 years. Again, it's seemingly random product detail pages being dropped. No manual action, no site errors (500 etc), no redirects or other problematic factors.

Roughly 1/3 of all tracked keywords in our long-running Moz pro campaign experienced either rank declines and a different page from the site being returned for the search, or suddenly not ranking whatsoever due to this matter of pages disappearing from the index. We are talking about product detail pages with >100 customer reviews  and other UCG, tons of backlinks etc.

Interestingly, a handful of pages and terms seem to have corrected overnight. Not all - but a handful. We updated sitemaps yesterday and added some sketchy domains to our disavow file last night.   None of the "usual suspects" types of issues explain this phenomenon.

[effectdigital]

According to Moz there haven't been any significant algorithm updates since October 2019 - https://mza.bundledseo.com/google-algorithm-change. If you check Algoroo (https://algoroo.com/) there's some noise on Dec 20th but it's not 'out of this world' or crazy. Looking at SERPMetrics Flux it doesn't look like a time of major changes on Google: https://serpmetrics.com/flux/

It must be something specifically related to your website or your website's presence (backlinks etc). It could also be a factor of operating in a competitive query-space. Maybe your results didn't go down, maybe the rankings of other sites went 'up'

I wouldn't expect the problem to 'just go away on its own', that almost never happens