Content API: I keep getting "Unavailable landing page" in GMC

[AnandaCreations]

Hi,

at some time last week I got a rising number of disapproved products in GMC totally stalling my advertising campaigns.

I removed the Conten API feed and added a "Crawl" feed which fixed the problem, but it's a pain to edit the missing information like age group manually in GMC.

So I re-added the Content API feed to check if it was a temporary problem, but it isn't. All products that are in stock" get disapproved due to "unavailable landing page" (mobile or dektop). Ironicall products out of stock get approved.

The links that GMC disapproves are totally working, for example:

https://ananda-creations.de/products/hamathit-armband-vitality?variant=37475382821018&currency=EUR&u...

https://ananda-creations.de/products/rosenquarz-mala-empathy?variant=37213124657306&currency=EUR&utm...

What am I missing here? It seem the Google Bot that crawls the links from the content api cannot access the site, while regular Googlebot can. I have no "robots.txt" or whatever. 

[Gift-o-the-Jab]

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6098155?hl=en#zippy=%2Cstep-see-the-affected-products%2C...

[AnandaCreations]

Well, I can't fix any of this because the shop is hosted on Shopify

[Gift-o-the-Jab]

Not much to do with "Shop being hosted on Shopify" or else every Shopify shop would be getting this error. As Google crawls your storefront, it has to do with your theme setup/theme code and any frontend apps that might be causing this. Go through this list from the above-linked doc:

Common crawl errors include:

• Page not found (404): The landing page was not found on the server. To fix this error, make sure you specify a working URL of the landing page with the link attribute.
• Too many redirects: Your landing page redirects too many times. To fix this error, make sure your landing page URL does not have more than two redirects.
• Could not connect / HTTP 5xx response: When we tried to access the landing page, the server could not process the request due to an unknown reason. To fix this error, make sure that your website is always available.
• Hostname not resolvable: We were not able to resolve the hostname. To fix this error, make sure that your DNS configuration is set up properly.
• URL protocol: The URL provided by the link attribute must start with 'http://' or 'https://' and use the domain name you verified either when you created your Merchant Center account or in the “Website” tab on the “Business information” page of your Merchant Center account. Any symbols used must be replaced by URL encoded entities, (for example, comma = %2C). Learn more about common product crawl issues

[EmmanuelFlossie]

I would have never setup a feed via a crawler. The native crawler is very limited and does not update frequently.

My recommendation is to use a dedicated data feed app, such as: https://apps.shopify.com/multiple-google-shopping-feeds

The unavailable issue, will take a few days to resolve, this is normal and can happen due to issues such as DNS, slow server, or just Google's bot having issues. Not really an issue you have on the website.

For pretty much all shopify clients I have, when this happens, it auto resolves in a few days maybe maximum a week.

I recommend reducing the image sizes, they are pretty big. Maybe only have the big image load when you click to enlarge.

[AnandaCreations]

Thank you for your input.

In order to use a 3rd party feed app, do I have to remove the "Google" channel from my Shopify since as far as I understand there can only be one Content Api feed in GMC?

[EmmanuelFlossie]

Yes, you should only submit 1 data feed, to avoid accidentally submitting the same product twice, which would be a policy violation.

However Content API is one of many feed mechanics that can be used. There is also Text Delimited, XML, FTP, Google Sheets and Web Crawler.

Content API is just 1 method of submitting products.

[AnandaCreations]

I now have imported all products with the 3rd party tool and used a different ID scheme (product_variant instead of global format ). It seems to have worked, all newly imported products are now marked as "active" and the errorneous items from the previous feed are gone.

However, in Google Ads the old products still show up, I guess that takes a little while to update?

[EmmanuelFlossie]

You should never change the ID scheme, it is always recommended to use the same ID.

To avoid duplicate listings.

To avoid losing historic performance.

To avoid confusing Google.

It takes 24 hours for Google Ads to update, after it is correctly submitted in Google Merchant Center.