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** I can't share the client's specific site name, but I will try my best to explain the problem.**

We have a major brand client whose just launched a new campaign for a new product they offer. This campaign has a lot of cash injected to it including a national TV advert and is huge for the client.

The main issue is that the page has stopped appearing in the SERPs when people type the campaign term. Another subdomain (owned by client) ranks instead, even though it's on-page SEO is vaguely related.

It used to rank number 1. None of the other domain pages have an issue.

There has been no linkbuilding, just naturally earned links due to the client being a household name brand.

When entering the page as a site search on Google it says the following:

subdomain.clientwesbite.com/category/product.html?intcmpid= A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

We've done everything: - Checked on Robots.txt to see if the page is being blocked and this isn't the issue. - The on-page is optimized for the page and the campaign keyword. - The canonical appears correctly. - The internal anchor text with the actual isn't pointing to other pages. - The external anchor text with the actual isn't pointing to other pages. - Updated the XML sitemap which included the target URL. - Updated the HTML sitemap to include the specific page.

Plus, when I test the cache of the page, it shows the homepage instead of the actual page.

We're all banging our heads against the wall but can't find the issue.

Anyone had similar problems? And how did you resolve it?

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    A few things. A robots.txt file should exist in the web root for subdomain.clientwesbite.com. The robots.txt in clientwesbite.com cannot apply to subdomain.clientwesbite.com. These are two separate sites. As well, you can test the robots.txt file using Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and use Fetch as Google on the pages in question. Make sure that you Render the page and visually inspect it. Sometimes Google makes mistakes. If this is the case, it will simply take time for Google to update the index. Make sure there are no redirects that get in the way.
    – closetnoc
    Feb 2, 2016 at 17:16
  • Cheers closetnoc, both of those things you mentioned are ticked off. We have a separate robot.txt file for the subdomain and have used fetch and render on the specific page. As you say, I think it will take time for Google to update the index. Feb 3, 2016 at 13:25

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