Google Cache issue

[fredgray]

Hi,

We’ve got a really specific issue – we have an SEO team in-house, and have had numerous agencies look at this – but no one can get to the bottom of this.

We’re a UK travel company with a number of great positions on the search engines – our brand is www.jet2holidays.com. If you try ‘Majorca holidays’, ‘tenerife holidays’, ‘gran canaria holidays’ etc you’ll see us in the top few positions on Google when searching from the UK.

However, none of our destination pages (and it’s only the destination pages), show a ‘cached’ option next to them. Example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=majorca+holidays&oq=majorca+holidays&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l3.2151j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

This isn’t affecting our rankings, but we’re fairly certain it is affecting our ability to be included in the Featured Snippets.

Checked and there aren’t any noarchive tags on the pages, example:

https://www.jet2holidays.com/destinations/balearics/majorca

Anyone have any ideas?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Fred,

Do you have access to your log files by any chance? You could try to see in there if you can see if GoogleBot is actually looking at these pages. Sometimes it's just a matter of cached pages not being visible in there although they are.

Martijn.

[willcritchlow]

Hi Fred. Just having a dig into this. A couple of things I have noticed so far that won't be causing this issue but that you might want to know about:

1. The page you mentioned is in the cache - you can see the cached version by going to cache:https://www.jet2holidays.com/destinations/balearics/majorca -- the cached html appears to match the live html so there doesn't seem to be a crawling or indexing problem
2. Your sitemap.xml link in your robots.txt goes to the http version which 301 redirects to https
3. There are warnings firing in the console in Chrome about distrusting your SSL certificate provider in an upcoming release: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html

[willcritchlow]

After a bit more digging (and a venture down a character encoding rabbit hole) I haven't come up with any smoking guns (mixed metaphor alert).

I don't suppose there's any chance those pages could have had a noarchive meta tag on them (or nosnippet) at any point in the past is there? It's possible that would remove the link but not remove the cached copy itself.

I'm honestly not sure there is going to be a ton of ROI to going further down the rabbit hole to be honest. I think it's most likely to either remain unsolved or be something you can't do anything about (and we don't even know if it's really causing actual issues).

If you want to continue debugging, I would run through these steps:

1. Take a page like the one you mentioned and duplicate it on a different URL outside of that folder structure and see if that gets a cache link
2. If it does, try 301 redirecting the page without the cache link to the one with the cache link and see if it disappears
3. Try the above but with the redirect the other way around

This will help narrow down what's going on - but doesn't guarantee that it'll be fixable, nor that there is actually any value to getting the cache link back.

If you have any more evidence on the other issues you referred to (featured snippets etc) let me know and I can look at that separately.

Let me know if you dig anything out. Good luck.