Thanks for this useful info. I've done some more digging however, I may have just stumbled across what could be the issue in the slow paced decline month on month...?

So back when we started to gradually loose SEO ground we were actually changing URL structure from

fishingtackleshop.com.au/categories/fishing-tackle  to fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-tackle    (we removed the /categories part of the URL  so link juice wasn't being passed onto that benign sub-directory "categories").

However, in a Screeming Frog Crawl today what i noticed but haven't picked up on before since i was only looking for 404 and 301 issues,  is it seems we are actually having canonical issues.

SO,

/fishing-tackle  is not indexed in google since it is canonicalised  to /fishing-tackle/ (trailing slash).. Why i don't know perhaps as developer has listed trailing slash link in the menu.

but /fishing-tackle/ is also not indexed when i just did a google search.

So, I am guessing i may have found my issue? (or a big part of it)!

canonical.png

Thanks for your feedback

To confirm they were not an old parent category that we set as not visable.  It was purely  new category set to non-visable in bigcommerec for design purpose due limitations.

I'll explain.  here is one page

https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-lures

You will note we have shop by category at the top..  but further below we have shop by species... for design purpose we had to create the parent category and set to not visable as "shop by species"  and put in a heap of Visable child categories under that. IE barra lures, bass lures etc.

However, the problem lied as in breadcrumbs even though we set category "shop by species" as not visible the link still showed in breadcrumbs. so we 301 redirected it back to the prior head parent category /fishing-lures  (effectively in the breadcrumb trail there was then 2 links to /fishing-lures

Long story short /fishing-lures-shop-by-species (the non visable catery) was a brand new category created for our design purpose of our live page https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing-lures  due to bigcommerce limitations.  It was never an active old page...

today i have removed the 301 and i will just create a landing page.  but over the past few days we have taken a further tank in our rankings and i cant understand why other than this theory.  content is original and not bad, established site since 2005, used to rank #1 for just about any keyword, previously targeted by negative SEO but Disavow file is updated once a month via SEMRUSH monitoring.

If you or anyone else have any further ideas for me to look at as for possible issues do share :).

Thanks again for taking the time to give your initial imput.

Hi all,

How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects?

We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb.

SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404.

However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months.  could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.

Due to Poor unsightly look of breadcrumbs and the space it takes up above the fold we only employ breadcrumbs on our desktop version. Breadcrumbs are hidden from view on mobile version. However as mobile first indexing is now in play what technical SEO impacts will this have?    one thing that comes to mind is crawling deeper pages where breadcrumbs made them accessible in less than 3 link clicks?  But i am unsure now of the impacts of not having breadcrumbs visible for mobile version of our site.