Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page

[TukTown]

Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance.

I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit.

Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side?

Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!

[effectdigital]

Only time I have encountered stuff like this is when Google cached a URL as it was in the middle of being redirected. For example on a big eCommerce store, it's common for URLs to redirect sometimes if the product is unavailable or out of stock, but then when they come back in stock they go back to 200 (OK). It's possible that some dev issue occurred, or that a product was temporarily experiencing normal redirect behavior - and Google happened to re-cache at that specific moment

If the WayBack Machine (Google it) has a backup of the page from the same day (or very close) you might be able to see the same behavior there to verify. Another possibility is that for some reason, Google's 'Googlebot' user-agent is being redirected on product pages or just their caching bot, a defense to 'stop' Google from caching their URLs (which some might argue can result in complications, e.g: if they accidentally put up a product listing with false info and corrected it later - if the old version were still cached, a user could 'prove' that they were missold on something - so some sites take measures to mess with Google's caching)

Try accessing the pages with the "Googlebot" user-agent and see what happens. Try this Chrome plugin, make sure to clear your cache and stuff before attempting to connect. It could always be a temporary Google glitch, but it's wise to explore at least a few possible avenues before reaching such a conclusion