Do you want to optimize your Shopify site's SEO? This involves several steps that need to be mastered to avoid making a mistake. Indeed, all it takes is one mistake to potentially block all of your site's content from Google and Bing. A mistake that could cost you many sales!
Let's see together in this image tutorial, how and why hiding a page from Google can be beneficial for your SEO.
Note that this manipulation is almost not described in Shopify help!
Why hide a page from search engines?
So, why do you need to hide a page on your Shopify site? For several reasons:
The first is often that the page brings little or no SEO interest. Let's take an example. The contact page. Are you really going to reference yourself on the word "contact"? Same for the legal notices page. What is the point of having it indexed and positioned? None except possibly losing the Google robot in the meanders of your site.
You may also have private pages or test pages that you don't want to reveal to competitors or search engines.
But it's the same for search pages, some products are useful for the technical side (gift wrapping for example) but not for SEO, useless collections (the /all collection for example).
In short, there are plenty of good reasons to block a page from Google. So how can you do this the easy way?
Steps to hide a page on Shopify
Go to your Shopify admin interface and click on settings:
Then go to the metafields in “custom definitions”. If your Shopify back office is not in French, then this is called “Custom Data”.
Then you go to “Pages” if you want to hide a page. The technique described here works for products, pages, and blog posts.
We will then create a new metafield by clicking on “Add a definition”.
Then you need to fill it with the following values:
Name: SEO Visibility (or any other name that suits you, here the field is free)
Namespace and key: seo.hidden (watch out for spelling mistakes!)
Type: integer
Minimum value: 0
Maximum value: 1
And there you have it, just save (top right)
Now, on all your pages, you will have a metafield at the bottom and you can fill in the SEO visibility field with 0 or 1.
By default, the field is empty and the page is indexed.
If you set the matefield to “1” then the page will disappear from several places on your site:
- It will no longer appear on the internal search engine
- She will have a “No index No follow” tag on her page
- It will disappear from the sitemap
Of course, if the page is linked from another page or product, it is still possible to access and view it. But it will become invisible in SEO.
If the page was already indexed, then it may take Google several weeks or months to remove it from its database. If it does not yet exist in Google, then Google will simply ignore it when visiting your site.
Some Tips for Effective Management
Don't hide your important pages!
Be careful not to block Google access to your top-selling product pages! That would be shooting yourself in the foot.
Don't hide all your pages
Be careful not to overuse this technique to hide too many pages. Always try to find the right ratio and limit yourself to pages that are truly unnecessary.
Make sure the page is hidden correctly
To be sure of the manipulation, you can also do a little test, go to your search page and type the name of your page. It should have disappeared from the site
Go to the sitemap, same thing, the page should have disappeared.
Final check: on the page, do “Ctrl + U” or “view page source code” then ctrl + F to search and check that “no index no follow” is present in the header of the page.
Other options
If you want to block a specific page from certain users or with a password but not deindex it, there are other solutions that we will describe in other articles:
- Block a page only for certain users
- Block a page with a password
Conclusion
You can now block a page of your Shopify store from a search engine to improve your SEO. Be careful, this is an advanced technique and can only be used if you have already worked on your content and netlinking.
If you have a technical issue with your Shopify site, you can always send us your questions in the comments or by email or contact our technical team for support!
