Some of my product pages went from number 1 or 2 to not showing on google help !

[jasonshanks]

So I just hope you guys can help me with this one. I also completely admit this was probably either something I screwed up. So as the title states, My site (Missingcord.com) has some product pages that have stopped showing in search for keywords unless its for the product image page. My pages would come up either under or above amazon / eBay. This is a very old site and this didn’t start happening to recently.

Not sure if related but I will also say that My admin was moving slow. I had been dealing with the issue before hand, before I posted here:

https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread....96#post1410596

This had been going on since before 2/9/2026. But around that time I turned on error logs to try and see if I could pin point something and try to fix it on my own. This didn’t work and I think I forgot about error log and left it on. Eventually it got so slow on the admin side of things that I Came here 2/12/2026 and posted to the thread above. Swguy showed me how to fix the slowness on the admin side of things. Everything is now working like it did, still making sales and now the admin side is zippy again. I notice my sales have slowed though, still getting but not at the same rate.

( example page: https://www.missingcord.com/canon/ac....95a-24v-0.33a )

Makes me wonder why sales have slowed, so I do a search for one of my items using its keyword (K30350) and it doesn’t come up normally in google. The product image comes up and customers can get to the page via that. But not like it use too. I find this strange as I have been in a top spot for that product for about 8 years. So I go to my google console and see

LCP issue: Longer than 4s (Mobile) ( Shows it at 5.9 in the details of the report )

in red. 100% of your pages load slowly (LCP)

I have no manual or security actions. I think. “Oh crap, I bet its because I left logging on and it slowed down the customer side! “

I quickly disable all error logging. I then ask google search to re-validate the pages it flagged. This is now 2/19/2026. I am freaking out and still am scared since this where I making my living from. Some pages still show just fine because older parts are hard to find.


What have I done since this?

Well besides asking google to re-validate the pages it flagged for the LCP issue. I have signed up for CDN. I went with the one my host has baked in , Bunny CDN. Because I was told it would speed up loading elements on the page. So note I have been having issues with scans from places in China hamming my site with connections for years(IP blocking never worked since they would change it each time even when I tried to block using the htaccess file, so the advice was always to Just get CDN so I did it for that reason too with bunnyCDN. Using bunnyCDN My LCP has dropped to 2.9. I also noticed that in my speed test using google page insights it now longer shows the ( LCP issue: Longer than 4s ) for 28 day warning history message , Is this because i started using the CDN ?

Did I cause this change via the error logs being on for so long? Or am I missing something, everything was working perfectly up till my admin got slow earlier this month. Strange thing is, Some of my product pages are still were they have always been for years with no change in search ranking.

Zen cart 1.5.6
PHP 7.4

[OldNGrey]

In the landing page for the search https://www.missingcord.com/index.ph...page=1&sort=2a you have

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

in the header.
This blocks that page and subsequent pages from being indexed.

[jasonshanks]

whoa! I honestly don't know how that got set that way.Or even how to remove it. Holy crap. Is there a setting for that ? Is that in the htaccess file file ? Its also confusing because the only changes i have made are disabling the admin check for updates as outlined in the post i had in my main body and having the logging on. Which i have now turned off. It was being indexed up till that point and had been for many years.

[jasonshanks]

plus google says this : That its been crawled and can appear on google.

Attachment 21177

[OldNGrey]

It is only the advanced search results page that has "no index no follow".

I may have given you a bum steer as the robot_pages_to_skip define in 'meta_tags.php' lists the pages where the meta tag "no index no follow" will be inserted. This includes advanced_search,advanced_search_result.

For version 1.5.8 this was moved to '/includes/robot_pages_to_skip.php' file. Refer to this forum post https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread...._pages_to_skip
My version 1.5.8a does not follow this for some reason. (I can't test back to zc1.5.6).

Why your text content doesn't show in Google I have no clue.

[jasonshanks]

Hey i appreciate you trying to help me. I actually looked at old copies of my site i had from very old back ups and they had the same code , so i figured it wasn't the cause from that. It really sucks that google search console has no live support or person to talk too. Its all " figure it out on your own" sorta deal. Even their forum has post going back years with no replies to them.

I am running out of options here since i very much use this install to make a living. Part of me is thinking to use this time to do a full upgrade and see if that helps.

[jasonshanks]

So I figure I would give some sort of update for my situation for anyone also experiencing it.

Where i am at now -

Whelp Out of no where this morning , My rank is back for all listing effected. I actually had more sales during the time all this was happening on other non effected links. Google has no live support for search console. And their user powered message board , recently got back to me with generic post which seemed like it may have been a bot.

What did I do ? -

Because I wasn't sure what caused of this , I decided to use the shotgun method. The main alert i got originally was for the LCP over 5.9 issue which is assumed was due to my site lagging from the issue swguy helped me fix or the fact that i left logging on for admin to try and solve the original issue and never disabled. Thus causing the lag on the store end. Which i assumed google search picked up on and punished me for via the search Ai. So i did the following;

1. Got an CDN ( BunnyCDN) , google was telling me a CDN could help with my LCP number via helping my page load faster.
2. Used a windows store app called " Mass image compressor" to lower the product image quality to 50% and did the same to my logo and banner images only too about 20% This almost halved their collective file size.
3. starting to research during a full upgrade to the latest version of zencart and collecting all my plug-ins to carry over. Since from what my understanding is that newer versions of PHP in addition to being more secure are also faster.

So far my LCP is holding at 2.8 And things seem to have gone back to to normal , It took a while and i am not sure what really happen to cause it. Since my LCP use be high before this at 3 ish.