E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed

[Ben-R]

Hello Everyone,

So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed.

Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far:

• Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up.
• Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic.
• Submitted the pages to Google Search Console.
• The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products).
• We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /admin
  Disallow: /cart
  Disallow: /orders
  Disallow: /checkout
  Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
  Disallow: /carts
  Disallow: /account
  Disallow: /collections/+
  Disallow: /collections/%2B
  Disallow: /collections/%2b
  Disallow: /blogs/+
  Disallow: /blogs/%2B
  Disallow: /blogs/%2b
  Disallow: /design_theme_id
  Disallow: /preview_theme_id
  Disallow: /preview_script_id
  Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
  Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml
• A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products.

Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help.

Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts!

Thank you in advance.

Best,

[Nigel_Carr]

It seems odd to deal with filtering here. I'd normally do that in Search Console under URL parameters but you have to be extremely careful altering stuff in there. If you email me the site I'll run a check on why Collections aren't showing.

[Ben-R]

Hello Nigel,

Thank you very much for your help. The reason we were a little hesitant to remove those lines from the robots.txt file is we were not sure if that would cause the ‘filtered’ pages we have for these collections to be indexed (Each collection can be sorted and filtered). We didn’t write the robots.txt originally and don’t really know what the syntax we would be removing is doing. While we try to find out and look for other options do you have any idea of whether it could have that type of impact?

Also, we checked and there’s not a ‘noindex’ tag present.

We currently only have one blog post up but oddly enough it does seem to be ‘indexed’ (even with the /blogs/ URL).

We’re not so experienced with backend Shopify elements but is it possible there’s an issue that related to Google only caching the collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products?

Any help or suggestions you have would be very much appreciated and thank you again!

Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or we could provide any further details in the meantime.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Best,

[Nigel_Carr]

Try deleting these from the Robots txt.

Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b

Submit again and see what comes up. I'd hazard that this is the most logical explanation apart from having a noindex tag on the collections pages.

Are the blogs pages coming up by the way?

Right click 'view source' and have a look if there is one there.

Regards

Nigel