Pages that are useless in a Google search, such as the cart or a customer's account, carry a noindex, follow tag. Google does not list them, but still follows their links to your products. Your shop does this by itself, so Google spends its time on the pages that sell.
Where to find it
There is nothing to set. It is built into every shop. You can see the tag in a page's source as <meta name="robots" content="…">.
How it works
These pages are always noindex, follow:
- Cart and checkout, including the coupon check.
- Sign in, create account, forgot password, phone code and sign in with a code pages.
- The customer's account, their orders and account details, and the wishlist.
- Order tracking and the thank-you page after an order.
- Review forms.
- Search results (
/products-list?q=…). - Sorted or filtered lists: any category or product list whose address has extra settings after
?, for example/category/three-piece?sort=price. They show the same products as the main list, just in another order or a part of them.
What still counts as a normal page:
- A list's own pages:
?page=2stays listable. - Ad and share tags:
fbclid,gclid,utm_…and similar do not make a page "noindex".
Your shop's robots.txt also asks search engines to skip the admin panel, cart, checkout, sign-in, account, wishlist, order tracking and search pages.
Good to know
- Why it helps. Without this, Google could find thousands of near-copies of your category pages (every sort and filter) and fewer of your real products.
- "follow" matters. Links on these pages still lead Google to your products and categories.
- One product. To keep a single product out of Google, set Hide from Google in its SEO (Google) section. It stays on sale in the shop.
- The whole shop. The store owner's switch Hide the whole store from Google (in Marketing & SEO › SEO settings) turns every page to
noindex, nofollow. - Hidden products (turned off in the shop) do not open for shoppers at all (not found, gone, or a redirect to the product that replaced them), so Google drops them.
Common problems
- Search Console lists "Excluded by 'noindex' tag". For the pages above this is expected, not an error.
- A real product page says noindex. Check that product's SEO (Google) section is not on Hide from Google, and that the owner's whole-store switch is off.
Related
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