Shopify Noindex
Not all pages on your Shopify store are meant to be indexed by search engines. Low-quality pages and duplicate content can actually hurt your SEO. That's why it's important to use the noindex tag on these types of pages.
But what is the noindex tag? Why should you use it? And how do you implement it on your Shopify store? Keep reading to find out.
What Does It Mean To Noindex
The noindex tag is an HTML tag that tells search engines not to index a certain page on your website. This tag is placed in the <head> of your HTML code. When search engine spiders crawl your website, they will not index the page that has the noindex tag.
The noindex tag is useful if you have a page on your website that you do not want visitors to find through search engines. Search engine bots, such as Googlebot, will still crawl the page but they will not index it.
The noindex tag is also useful if you have a page on your website that is under construction and you do not want people to find it until it is finished.
What Kind of Pages to Noindex
There are several different types of pages that you might want to consider noindexing:
Pagination
Pagination is when you split up content into multiple pages. For example, if you have a blog with 50 posts, you might want to paginate it so that there are ten posts per page. In this case, you would noindex the second page of the blog and subsequent pages. This is because the content on these pages is duplicative of the content on the first page. Indexing them could result in penalties
Thin Content Pages
These are pages with very little content. They might have a few sentences or a short paragraph. When it comes to SEO, thin content is not very useful. That's because it doesn't provide much value to searchers. It also tells search engines that your website is not authoritative, and this might hurt your SEO.
Collection Tags and Blog Tags
Collection tags are used to group products together on your Shopify store. For example, you might have a collection of t-shirts and another collection of pants. Each collection has its own URL.
Blog tags are used to group blog posts together on your Shopify store. For example, you might have a blog tag for "SEO" and another blog tag for "social media." Each blog tag has its own URL.
Both collection tags and blog tags can create a lot of duplicate content on your website. That's because they generate multiple pages with very similar content. As a result, it's a good idea to noindex these types of pages.
Other pages you should noindex include:
- Pages associated with user accounts: These pages are typically only useful to the person who is logged in. They are unique to each user and are not useful to anyone else. Therefore, there is no reason to index these pages.
- Guest checkout pages: Your Shopify checkout page is a good candidate for noindexing. This is because it's a unique URL that is only used once. There’s no reason for someone to find this page through a search engine.
- Faceted navigation: Faceted navigation allows visitors to filter products by attributes such as color, size, and price. These pages are typically not very useful to anyone other than the person who is looking for a specific product. As a result, it's usually best to noindex these pages.
- Products you don't want to sell: If you have a product that you don't want to sell for some reason, you can noindex the page. This will prevent people from finding the page through search engines and accidentally buying the product.
Why You Should Noindex
There are several benefits to noindexing pages on your Shopify store:
Save Crawling Budget
One of the main benefits of noindexing pages is that it can save your crawling budget. Crawling is the process that search engine spiders use to index your website. When a spider crawls your website, it follows links and indexes the pages it finds.
Crawling budget is the amount of time and resources a search engine is willing to spend on crawling your website. If you have a lot of pages on your website, it can use up your crawling budget very quickly.
If you have a large website with thousands of pages, you might want to consider noindexing some of the less important pages. This will save the search engine spider from crawling these pages and help you conserve your crawling budget.
Prevent Duplicate Content Issues
Another benefit of noindexing pages is that it can prevent duplicate content issues. If you have multiple pages on your website with similar content, it's a good idea to noindex the less important pages. This will help the search engine to focus on the most important page and prevent duplicate content issues.
At GoldenWeb, we thoroughly analyze your website before making any decisions about noindexing pages. We check for things like duplicate content, thin content, and other factors that can impact your website's ranking. Once we identify the pages that should be noindexed, we add the appropriate tag to those pages.
Improve PageRank
Noindexing pages can also improve your website's PageRank. PageRank is a measure of the importance of a webpage. It's used by Google to determine which pages should be displayed first in the search results.
Our Shopify SEO audit identifies low-quality pages that might be negatively impacting your website's PageRank. We can then help you to noindex these pages and improve your website's overall ranking in the search results.
Prevent Technical Pages from Appearing in the Search Results
There are some pages on your website that you don't want to appear in the search results. For example, you might have a page with technical information such as your website's sitemap or a page with contact information.
Noindexing these pages can help to prevent them from appearing in the search results and improve the overall quality of your website's search listings.
Note: Before you noindex pages, however, make sure you check them on Google Search Console to see if they're getting significant traffic, or if they're ranking for any keywords. The biggest mistake you can make is noindexing a page that's generating traffic or revenue.
How to Noindex Pages
There are many waysto noindex pages on your Shopify store. We like to do it by adding the appropriate tag to the <head> section of your website's code, or we can use the robots.txt file to tell the search engine spiders not to index certain pages.
How to Noindex by Editing the Robots.txt File
The Shopify robots.txt file is a text file that contains instructions for search engine spiders. You can use the robots.txt file to tell the spider which pages it should index and which pages it should ignore.
To noindex a page using the robots.txt file, you need to add a line of code that looks like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /page-to-noindex/
This code tells the spider not to index the page that is specified after the Disallow command.
How to Noindex by Adding a Meta Tag
Another way to noindex a page is by adding a meta tag to the <header> of that page. The meta tag looks like this:
meta name="robots" content="noindex"
This code tells the spider not to index the page that contains this meta tag.
You can also use the meta tag to noindex an entire store. To do this, you would add a line of code that looks like this:
meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"
This code tells the spider not to index any pages on your website but it will still follow the links on those pages.
Partner with the Most Trusted SEO Agency
At GoldenWeb, Shopify Noindex is just one of the over 285 potential SEO and CRO potential growth opportunities we cover in our comprehensive SEO audit. Our thorough audit identifies key Shopify technical SEO issues and provides actionable recommendations to increase traffic and conversion.
We have stood the test of time and delivered growth to thousands of Shopify stores. We offer a free mini-audit that will give you a taste of what our team can do for you. Book yours today, and see how we can help you to optimize and grow your Shopify store.
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