Google seems to have indexed an offline or dev copy of our website. When searching in Google customers see a link to our site for the product. When clicked from mobile this link brings them to a product page that has no theme and is in USD (Not Euro). When clicked from desktop the customer ends up at our home page.
We have noticed that there is a difference in the URL structure on the unthemed page delivered via mobile.
Example - our website - mysite/products/productA
Mobile link not working - mysite/a/p/products/productA
The 2nd URL has a strange /a/p in it. Does anyone know what this is, where it is and how we can address this. It is causing some minor issues for people who find us via Google search.
It sounds like Google may have indexed a cached or dev version of your website that is not the same as the live version of your website. This can happen if Google has not crawled your site recently or if your site has recently undergone changes.
The strange /a/p in the URL may be an indication that the URL was generated by a development or testing environment. It is possible that this URL was accidentally indexed by Google instead of the live version of the page.
To address this issue, you can take a few steps:
Verify that your live site is accessible and functioning correctly. Check that the URL structure is correct and that the pages are displaying the correct information.
Request that Google re-crawl your site. You can do this by using the Google Search Console, which allows you to submit a request for Google to re-crawl specific pages or the entire site. This will help to ensure that Google is indexing the most up-to-date version of your site.
Check your website’s source code to ensure that there are no instances of the /a/p URL structure. If there are, you should update these URLs to match the correct URL structure.
Consider implementing canonical tags on your website. This will help to indicate to Google which version of a page is the preferred version to index.
Overall, it’s important to ensure that your website is functioning correctly and that the correct version of your pages is being indexed by Google. By following the steps outlined above, you should be able to resolve the issue and ensure that customers are able to access your site properly.
Hi @MarkyDjbox . The answer by FlareAI is quite comprehensive and is the proper way to resolve this issue. However it may take some time by the Google to fix this issue. In the mean time you can redirect these faulty pages to the working website pages. With this, sales will not be affected on your website.
So we did this and after the crawl it is actually worse. Google has now indexed even more of these /a/p pages.
It might be worth mentioning this only happens on mobile devices and not on desktop. If you run the same search and click the same result on desktop it’s fine on mobile it goes to the “un-themed” store. It’s bizarre…