Losing traffic and Rich Results after changing a Shopify theme

A customer emailed me about a major issue that happened to their site. I’ll let them describe it in their own words:

Found the listing in google search, which is actually only a week old listing, clicked on it then proceeded to a 404 page. I had done some theme changes a few days ago to improve something else. I have reversed that, but still it doesn’t work.
We only have around 10 product pages so far that look right, out of the 1800 pages.

What happened to this store is the fear of many Shopify store owners, perhaps even you share that fear.

That’s a fear of making a change to your theme and losing Rich Results and even the product page itself in Google.

In this case, it sounds like hundreds of pages were affected. 

When Google crawls a page and finds your structured data, they'll save it in their database (called the index). If you depend on your theme's structured data and then change themes, that data may get removed while Google re-analyzes the pages.

Combine that with a theme that changed how links to products were created, and you have a bunch of broken links.

Their old theme used collection-aware URLs, where the product URL includes the collection name. 

The new theme, however, no longer uses collection-aware URLs and uses the product-only URL. 

• Collection-aware URL: https://example.com/collections/frontpage/products/some-product
• Product-only URL: https://example.com/products/some-product

In Shopify, these two URLs are mostly the same thing, but to Google, although the content is the same, the URLs are considered completely different.

Since this store was using the collection-aware URLs throughout the site, Google was also using the collection-aware URLs for indexing instead of the product-only URL.

With the theme removing the collection-aware URLs, all of a sudden every one of those older URLs became invalid (404 error). Google sees 404s as that page is no longer there so they'll start to remove the URLs that were indexed from their database.

Including removing the Rich Results.

Yikes!

Luckily this customer has a way to try to recover their Google listings but it will be a few weeks or months with lower traffic while everything recovers.

Theme changes can cause issues with your SEO, so don't take them lightly. That doesn't mean never change your theme. It does mean being diligent and paying attention could save you a lot of stress. 

While it won’t fix the problems with URL changes, JSON-LD for SEO can help you save any Rich Results you might have gotten. Because it uses the product-only URL, Google knows to use the main product-only URL in its database.