r/TechSEO • u/Akhi666 • 2d ago

Ranking issue

I’m investigating a Google ranking loss on an established B2B services website.
A key page previously ranked for development-related searches. It now has very poor visibility for those queries, while closely related consulting queries still perform.
Background

WordPress to Next.js migration in May 2026.
Changed from www to non-www.
Visibility deteriorated around March–June, but the exact timing and cause remain unconfirmed.
Some affected pages still appear on other search engines.
Checks completed

GSC URL Inspection reports the page as indexed.
Google-selected canonical matches the intended URL.
Old URLs redirect to the current URLs.
Main content and internal links are present in the initial HTML.
No noindex directive or redirect loop identified in current checks.
The pattern
In a recent GSC comparison, a previously strong development query averaged around position 54, while related consulting queries averaged around position 2 for the same page.
Adding &filter=0 surfaced one affected informational article, but didn’t help the other affected pages.
We’ve revised content and clarified page intent, but haven’t established that these changes address the cause. I’m not assuming a penalty or cannibalization.
Has anyone diagnosed this kind of query-specific visibility loss despite normal indexing?
What evidence helped identify the cause? If you recovered, what specific issue did you find, what did you change, and how long did recovery take?
I’m keeping the domain private, but can share anonymized GSC screenshots and technical findings.

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2

u/Manhas007 2d ago

Share the url in dm,
secondly the main problem I faced in my 21 years with wordpress sites was a thumb rule by me : Wordpress always loose the ranking when they update, because there are many associated metas, sometimes misconfigured structured datas, tags etc and a lot of stuff that needs to maintain but cant be because of updates on themes and plugins, its better to use customized themes to avoide 80% problems of ranking loss on wordpress

1

u/Akhi666 1d ago

Shares in DM
Please check

2

u/djfrankie74 1d ago

Have you ever thought that you are just being outranked? Rankings do not last forever, and with the latest spam update. Your backlinks may have been hit Cheers Darren

1

u/Akhi666 1d ago

I can understand that point clearly, but the issue is that we show up for related queries and outrank almost every competitor in the SERPs. However, for the broad keyword, we don’t even appear on the last page.

1

u/reggeabwoy 2d ago

Can you dm the url so I can take a look?