: Google caching wrong content for top ranking URL causing rankings to drop 12 pages When I use 'cache:example.com/category' Google is showing the homepage 'example.com' as the URL for the cached

Posted in: #Cache #GoogleIndex #GoogleRanking

When I use 'cache:example.com/category' Google is showing the homepage 'example.com' as the URL for the cached content.

If I Google search 'info:example.com/category' it returns a result for the homepage as well.

It seems Google is mistakenly indexed the homepage, as our /category page.
The page in question has taken a hit in rankings (from page1 to page12... page12!)

An interesting part is that if I do 'cache:' or 'info:example.com/category/' with a trailing slash Google seems to show the proper cache/info result and shows the URL without the trailing slash.

More info regarding the effected category URL:

the URL with a trailing slash is redirected to URL without trailing slash
no redirects for the URL in question (without trailing slash)
meta robots is follow,index
query params are disallowed (?color=red) and are self-canonicalized to the URL without query params anyways.
robots.txt is not blocking any resources or the URL to page
Google can fetch and render the page fine and Googlebot version is identical to user version

Response Headers are as follows:

cache-control:no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
content-encoding:gzip
content-type:text/html; charset=UTF-8
date:Wed, 31 Jan 2018 14:40:37 GMT
expires:Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
pragma:no-cache
server:nginx
status:200
vary:Accept-Encoding
x-content-type-options:nosniff
x-frame-options:SAMEORIGIN
x-frame-options:SAMEORIGIN
x-sucuri-cache:BYPASS
x-sucuri-id:14018
x-xss-protection:1; mode=block

Platform we are using is Magento 1.9x

I have requested reindexing of the URL(without trailing slash) several times in past week or so, and while it seems Google has indeed crawled the page several times since then, it still shows wrong content for 'cache:' and 'info:'
Seemingly it still thinks the homepage is the proper canonical/content for the URL!

I'm not sharing actual domain URL for privacy reasons.