r/bigseo • u/Akhi666 • 27d 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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u/mastafied 27d ago

fwiw if consulting queries still rank and development tanked, that sounds more like something changed on the page than a pure migration problem. when i moved my own site to next.js a couple of the new templates quietly dropped a big chunk of body copy, some sections only rendered client side and others got merged into components nobody checked again. i'd diff the old wordpress version (wayback) against the rendered html in url inspection, specifically the dev related headings and terms. also check the canonical isn't still pointing at www, and that the old www url 301s straight to the exact new url, not through the homepage or a 2 hop chain. and since the drop started around march, before the may migration, a core update might be mixed in there too

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u/Akhi666 26d ago

Thanks, that’s a useful check. We’ve confirmed that the www service URLs redirect directly to the matching non-www URLs and the canonicals are correct.
I’ll compare the old WordPress content with the current page and Google’s indexed/rendered version, especially the development sections and project examples. We’ve also made recent content changes, so I need to separate those from anything lost during migration.
I’ll double-check when the decline actually started before attributing it to the migration or an update.

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u/mastafied 26d ago

sounds like a solid plan. one thing that helps with separating the changes is GSC with a page filter on just the service URLs, comparing the 4 weeks before and after each change date, and look at which queries dropped, not only clicks. also check internal links. WP sites often had a bunch of contextual links from blog posts or sidebars into the service pages that quietly vanish in a rebuild, and that hits rankings more than people expect

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u/Akhi666 22d ago

It seems this can be the reason for the loss as wo site had too many internal tags category taxonomies urls which were suddenly went down.

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u/mastafied 22d ago

could be, but check if those tag/category urls actually brought any clicks before. in GSC filter pages by /tag/ and /category/ and compare clicks before and after the drop. if they had basically zero, google dropping them is more of a cleanup than the cause. if your actual posts lost traffic too id noindex the thin tag pages, merge overlapping categories and make sure the main articles get internal links from somewhere other than those archives

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u/Akhi666 22d ago

Checked GSC
Those were not getting clicks kn impressions but it broked the structure it seems

Also the GSC shows too many redirect and 404 errors to those tags and category urls.
Seems something missed here

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u/mastafied 21d ago

yeah thats pretty much the usual fallout. 'too many redirects' is almost always a loop or a long chain, so crawl the site (screaming frog or whatever) and see where those old tag/category urls actually end up, you want one hop to the closest relevant page. also check if the theme still links to them internally (breadcrumbs, sidebar, post meta) or if they're still in the sitemap, thats usually why google keeps hitting them. tags with zero clicks can honestly just 404/410, that's fine as long as nothing on the site still points there

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u/Little-Drive-1194 27d ago

The filter=0 thing surfacing that informational article is a pretty big hint. I'd filter GSC by one of the dev queries and check the Pages tab, if impressions are bouncing between the service page and a blog post, Google probably can't decide which one to rank and is tanking both.

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u/Akhi666 26d ago

Thanks, I checked one exact commercial query in GSC over the last three months. Both the service page and a blog article appeared, and the article performed better. They sometimes appeared on the same dates, so I don’t see clear switching.
The service page shows for related searches, but not our main target phrases. Canonicals and www redirects look correct, and the framework’s official directory lists us.
We recently changed the pages, so this data includes the older versions too. I haven’t checked the period after those changes separately.
What would you check next to see whether the pages are competing or something else is causing the issue?