dear community,
i have been seeing some weird ranking problems for several of our products since a couple of months and i need some help / advice.
this is what is happening:
- when an user is searching for our {company name} + {product name} we are ranking with our product page. like it should
- when a user is searching only for {product name} some products are not ranking at all!
- when a user is searching for {product name} + {product category e.g. backpack} we are showing again
our product name is quite unique so there are no misunderstandings or mixed search intent-
for some products this works fine. for other products from this category this only works for certain color variants. we are sometimes not shown at all for queries without our company name. only price search engines like idealo or some retailers are ranking and they are ranking with our products.
here is
some background on the domain history and some theories i tried:
I was involved in a website relaunch last year. We replaced the shop system, changed the url structure and submitted a new sitemap structure. (so a lot of changes) before the relaunch we were ranking for this type of search queries without any issues.
However, we kept many things the same: we used the same images, structured data is fine, the navigation remained untouched. i have done my homework, we have forwarded everything important via 301 redirect , the most important pages are in the index. robots.txt does not block anything and we also have title and meta description with the most important product names. the canonicals are also set up correctly. the h1 contain the correct product name.
the only things that are running bad so far are:
- hreflang problems: we have the same german content for germany, austria and switzerland on three different pages. it had to be implemented like that in the new shop system. unfortunately our hreflangs didn't work in the sitemap. we fixed that in the meantime and wrote the hreflangs into the html. now we also see rankings in austria and switzerland, where only the german url is ranked.
- the lcp takes longer to load than before. unfortunately we can't fix that easily.
I already tried to check for these issues:
- indexing issues: all product pages are indexed and can be found through navigation / internal linking or the sitemap. the important pages are indexed, getting traffic but do not rank for queries without our company name
- tried other search engines like bing or yandex: it looks all good. only issue is google for some reason
- rendering issues: i checked with google mobile testing tool and search console if content can be rendered correctly and it looks good. is there any other more reliable way to check?
- checked other countries: most other countries like italy netherlands and france look fine and don't suffer from this issue
have you ever experienced something like this? do you have any ideas or problems i should check out. any help is greatly appreciated. thank you!
