We discovered the problem in the most common way possible, conversion and traffic were in freefall all of a sudden, noted by our conversion optimization team.
The affected URLs matched perfectly to those being tested, but there was no reason why this test - a minor content change - should completely annihilate those pages from the search results.
When I checked the canonical tag? That's when I saw that they were duplicates, and they were giving crawl bots different instructions.
Technical SEO basics still matter, even in the face of major search changes, as illustrated by a dramatic 41% loss and recovery of targeted traffic.
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