glazergallery

Why is this marked resolved? It definitely is not!

I will check into that, just to rule those out, and just posted to the YITH Catalog Mode support forum. But it’s confusing because we’ve had YITH Catalog Mode activated since we started the WooCommerce site in 2016 and until two weeks ago, we never had this problem. I don’t think it’s WooCommerce Visibility because the pages listed as Out of Stock are not included in hidden categories.

I called and spoke to someone at another large art and antique website that lists multiple dealers selling unique items like we do, because I could see they also had items listed as Out of Stock that were in stock. She said they noticed the problem two weeks ago and it is some change Google has made that they, too, are trying to figure out and see if they need to make a change to prevent this. So this appears to be a problem that transcends our particular circumstance.

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 3 days ago by glazergallery.
• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 3 days ago by glazergallery.
• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 3 days ago by glazergallery.

Zubair,

Does this article about the “availability attribute” potentially have anything to do with it, and is there I way to fix this within WooCommerce so Google reads my pages correctly? —

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324448?hl=en&sjid=16326235260713477235-NA

Hi Zubair,

You’re right, I think it’s maybe Google for WooCommerce that is the relevant one. I don’t think Google Analytics will fix this issue. I’m totally baffled and disturbed because now is see in the Google Search Console that Google has crawled the site, is returning results for URLs showing items as “In Stock” when I run the URL Inspection tool, and furthermore, showing the prices as valid through 12/31/26, and yet still shows these URLs as “Out of Stock” in the search results. Are there any other reasons Google is displaying one thing in the URL inspector and another in the actual search results that the public sees?

I was looking at the Google Merchants Center. https://merchants.google.com/mc/overview and that’s where you see the attached screenshot recommending Google for WooCommerce. We do meet the criteria in having items for sale with prices — although some are listed as Price on Request — and we could fill in the Shipping and Return policies info. But we do not have a “Shopping Cart” on our site. People have to communicate directly with us to place an order, and we use the YITH Catalog Mode plugin. Since the ordering process is not entirely automated, would that be incompatible with being listed in the Merchants Center or using Google for WooCommerce?

But also, what I’m really wondering is if this would solve the problem of having “Out of Stock” plastered on our search results or not. Or even possibly solve it? Or do you have advice as to where I can get a response from someone at Google, or which forum is likely to get their attention? In the Merchant Center documentation I did find this: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/14980864?hl=en which seems to imply there’s a way to fix these problems through the Merchant Center, if I understand it correctly.

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 4 days ago by glazergallery.
• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 4 days ago by glazergallery.
• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 4 days ago by glazergallery.

While in the Google Search Console I saw it was promoting me to add Google for WooCommerce and join the Google Merchant Center? Should I do that? Would installing Google Analytics for WooCommerce and following the steps possibly solve this problem? I downloaded the plugin but hesitate to set this up without really understanding it.

Here is the link. No replies yet: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/327496303/google-search-results-label-in-stock-items-as-out-of-stock-widespread-issue-affecting-many-sites

Thank you for pointing me in the direction of sitemap generating plugins. I followed up and chose one that generated XML files for the Product Pages, Categories, and Pages. I have successfully uploaded them to Google although it appears as of 24 hours later, the site has not yet been recrawled. However, in trying from random search terms that relate to our site, I have discovered that it is not just a problem for us but for some very large businesses. This is certainly a serious bug for businesses that rely on Google for people to find us.?I could see this is a problem affecting large businesses like Incollect and 1stDibs, too, and they are written on different platforms. We use WordPress with a WooCommerce plugin, but a look at their page source code shows they are built differently, but we all have the same problem. Try searching for “hb nims floor globe” and?you will see that it’s not just us — while the Search Results for Incollect and 1stDibs say “Out of Stock,” if you click the links, they are most definitely In Stock.

I am not totally persuaded that recrawling our site is going to fix the problem, though, because obviously Google?is?finding the pages and their content and images, and the Rich Results Test on one of the URLs Google is showing as Out of Stock in the search results it returns for?https://www.georgeglazer.com/wpmain/product/game-astronomy-moon-and-stars-ring-toss-american-c-1925/?shows the following data: “availability ??https://schema.org/InStock” ?Why then, does it display it as Out of Stock?!

I posted this exact question on the Search Console Forum and urged Google to address this immediately. I also wrote to Incollect and 1stDibs and pointed it out to them, hoping that a large business with more resources than we have will be able to move Google to address what looks more and more like a Google bug. Keep this thread open and I will update you all if I find a resolution.

Thanks for checking, but no, I’m still seeing Out of Stock with that very same search “seba cobra.” I used to understand how to get Google to recrawl the product pages via the Search Console — it used to be simple — but this new system, as far as I can tell, requires me to generate a sitemap first or submit one URL at a time, and when I tried just submitting that URL, it rejected it as unfindable and took me to a sitemap page which I screenshot. (See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/ask-google-to-recrawl and https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap to see what Google is asking for.) How would you suggest I go about creating the sitemap and pointing Google to it with WooCommerce? Does it have a feature that will do that? And are there instructions to walk me through the process step by step that I can refer to? My WordPress WooCommerce site are all within the URL https://www.georgeglazer.com/wpmain/.

(We do have some legacy pages as well that are not in WordPress that are only under https://www.georgeglazer.com (without the wpmain folder) that we’d like to Google to crawl as well so if you happen to know how to encompass those, please do include that advice.)

Also, what do you mean by clearing any caching plugins or CDN cache? I have never encountered those terms, and a search for WooCommerce clear cache on the WooCommerce site showed me a dashboard that apparently is no longer used by WooCommerce. So I need to know what I would do to clear them.

• This reply was modified 4 weeks ago by glazergallery.

@shameemreza I finally found the problematic code and it was where you and others suspected, in the custom code in the child theme. As I said in the first post I made describing this issue, the debug log said that the problematic command was add_text. However, I had no idea what function was calling on add_text. I had looked for it in all the child theme PHP files by doing a Find command with my browser on each page, while it was loaded in the Dashboard. I tested the Find function by searching for code I knew was in the PHP file and it worked. But for some reason, it did NOT find add_text, even though it was there in my child theme’s functions.php file. I even tried that search on different days and it never turned up. It seems weird, but that’s what kept happening.

The way I finally found where add_text was hiding was through the Find function in Bluefish, which is an open source editor for webpage code that I use sometimes to edit HTML files on non-WordPress sites. I searched the files I had stored on my local machine and it found it in the child theme functions.php and Bluefish’s Find also told me which line it was on. Now that I knew where it was, I deleted that code and PHP 8 is not causing the problem on product pages — nor, apparently anywhere else. I know what the purpose of that code was, it was indeed specific to product pages, but I can accomplish the same thing another way so I don’t need it anymore.

Therefore, my advice to anyone else who is looking for a specific phrase in your Child Theme while it’s open in the File Editor in the WordPress dashboard is see if you can do a Find somewhere else, because Find in the dashboard may not work.

• This reply was modified 5 months, 4 weeks ago by glazergallery.

Hi @shameemreza,

I followed your suggestions and checked my plugins and none say they are incompatible with PHP 8. I also created a staging site and deactivated all the plugins except WooCommerce. It made no difference. The problem with getting rid of my custom code is that the custom code is what styles the navigation bar. So if I run the site without the portions of the Child Theme that style the navigation bar, which are in header.php and style.css, I can’t tell why the navigation bar displays on every page except Product pages, because the navigation bar won’t display on any pages at all without that styling. I hate to give up an attractive navigation bar that has served us well in the past. The theme is one recommended for use with WooCommerce (Site Origin Vantage). I have contacted Site Origin and they see no reason the theme should cause an issue. And surely if it works with everything else in WooCommerce except this one type of page, it means the fault is not my custom code but something that is different about Product Pages than every other page on a WooCommerce site.

So am still stuck! Any ideas?

@ckadenge — Thanks for the tip. I did try testing for plug in conflicts before and turned up nothing useful, but I can try again. Today I created a staging site so I can do that methodically. I will report back to this thread what I find.

The standard advice for resolving theme conflicts probably doesn’t help because if I change the theme to Storefront or one of the basic themes, the masthead won’t display correctly anyway, because the masthead formatting is stored in the Child Theme.

As for “add_text” — that’s very interesting that you are able to see that is the command causing problems. I am able to see that it does not appear in any of the .php files for my Child Theme so we can rule it out there at least, if I understand you correctly.

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Thank you Pepe. That was interesting reading — clearly collapsing the short description was an unpopular change. I also am glad to see in that discussion that the changes are going to be reverted to having it open by default in version 7.2. I do have this comment, however, which I just added in the discussion you linked to:

I have never understood why the layout of the Edit Page is reversed. It makes no intuitive sense. It also is an annoying quirk since the business owner I work for writes up the info for the product pages in Word documents that we copy-paste into those fields -- a list of the main features and a short intro paragraph into the Short Description, and then the details, if there are any (and sometimes there aren't) into the long description part. I've gotten used to scrolling down to paste the Short Description info in when I open an Edit Page, and then scrolling back up, and have never liked that I had to do that. Moreover, when opening the Edit Page if there is no long description, you're greeted with a blank box on opening it. So as long as we're questioning collapsing Short Description, I think putting it at the top is a change that's long overdue for a smoother workflow. And it would also help new users if part of the goal is making this more intuitive to use.

I felt the same way seeing your post. And also, it reverts to closed even when I preview the page and then immediately return to the edit page for further editing so I have to repeatedly reopen the tab as I’m working.

We’re having the same problem and I was about to post about it, too — it definitely is annoying to have to expand it every time we edit a product. I noticed it started happening after we updated to the latest version of WordPress a week or so ago. Maybe it’s a bug?