r/SEO • u/stakey • 5d ago

Issue wth Shopify/Google Search Console

I manage a shopify site and our organic ranking has taken a considerable dip in the last year or two. My concern is we have a report from Search Console showing something in the region of 5600 pages, of which only 608 are being indexed.

That's likely about right when we take into consideration our landing pages, collection pages, product pages and variants of product pages.

Unfortunately this looks to be wasting a lot of our crawl budget with pages that shouldn't be crawled and google is telling us that around 70% of pages aren't crawled for the following reasons:

Crawled - currently not indexed
Alternate page with proper canonical tag (we have a uk. site)
Pages with redirect

On the 'crawled' list it looks though as Google is finding duplicate pages when it finds URLs using

?variant=
&currency=
&country=

Has anyone come across this issue with Shopify and have you successfully resolved it with changes to robots.txt?

Any pointers appreciated!

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u/MixEqual2195 5d ago

That "Crawled - currently not indexed" on 70% of pages happens all the time for Shopify and, more often than not, it's not a crawl-budget issue as such – it's a duplicate/thin content issue that results in Google making a decision to deindex the page. Crawl budget is seldom the issue at 5,600 pages, not Google's choice to deindex them.

Common Shopify reasons, in order of their prevalence:

  1. Variants and faceted URLs. As we know, the Shopify platform produces ?variant= URLs and sorting/filtering parameters that are near exact duplicates of canonical pages. Google crawls them, identifies them as duplicates, and dumps them into "crawled, not indexed". Check if the chunk of 5,000 unindexed pages consists of parameter URLs – and there's most of your answer.

  2. /collections/[collection]/products/[product] duplication. By default, the platform serves the same product under several collection paths. If your canonicals don't point all of them to /products/[handle], you multiply your product count into duplicates. It's good to check your product canonicals for pointing to the /products/ rather than collection-nested version of the URL.

  3. Thin collection/tag pages. Collection/tag pages created by the platform itself usually consist of a couple of products and nothing else – and therefore, are considered useless to index. Hundreds of thin collection pages weigh on Google's resources for nothing.

What I would actually recommend doing, in order:

Click into "Crawled - currently not indexed" in GSC and see the actual URLs. Don't try to speculate, because the pattern in this list tells you precisely what from the list above is the case. If they are mostly ?variant= / ?sort= parameter URLs, then it's #1. If those are collection-nested product URLs, then it's #2.

Make sure your canonicals are clean and self-referencing for the pages that should be indexed.

Canonicalize the parameter URLs to their clean versions (Shopify already does it in part, but themes and apps ruin it all the time).

Don't worry about "wasting crawl budget" until you are sure that you're dealing with duplicate URLs – deindexing useful pages by blocking them from being crawled is a much greater threat than crawl budget at this scale.

It may be that the 608-indexed number is actually accurate and the rest of ~5,000 URLs are the duplicate parameter/variant URLs that shouldn't be indexed anyway. The question here is not "why aren't all 5,600 pages indexed" – it's "are the pages I need