Issues with Google Indexing for a big Product Catalog

[Elena8]

Hi there,

We have a Shopify shop in 3 different domains, holding over 250.000 different part numbers and we are struggling to get them all indexed.

We have gone live with each domain at different times (with a few months in between each of them), updated the standard Shopify sitemap and have observed same trend in all shops:

- First we get most of the product pages indexed, over 200k,

- Then we start going down (big drop half of July due to Google changes) for all submitted pages

- But at the same time, we slowly start going up in indexing for the pages that are not submitted on index

The only difference we can see is that the product pages that Shopify includes on the site map are by default: 

https://name_shop/products/name_product

And the url that Google is starting to index, without being submitted are based on this structure:
https://name_shop/collections/name_collection/products/name_product

Is this a common issue on the Shopify community?

Should we always prioritize the URLs with collections on them?

Is there a way to change the Shopify sitemap to include the url that Google seems to prefer (https://name_shop/collections/name_collection/products/name_product)?

Thanks,

[Calvin_Baker]

This is common with shopify, if you have customization option for products each customization will result in a separate URL which is being canonicalized, if you have done this manually then depending on the changes google will index/de-index the URLs

[Elena8]

Hi Calvin,

If i understand you correctly, then: Should we always prioritize the URLs with collections on them?

Do you knoe if there is a way to change the Shopify sitemap to include the url that Google seems to prefer (https://name_shop/collections/name_collection/products/name_product)?

Thanks a lot,

[Mika_Lepisto]

The only difference we can see is that the product pages that Shopify includes on the site map are by default: 

https://name_shop/products/name_product

And the url that Google is starting to index, without being submitted are based on this structure:
https://name_shop/collections/name_collection/products/name_product

I'm assuming your stores are relatively new or recently migrated?

Google is indexing what they can crawl first, which is the /collections/* URLs. They are canonical back to the /products/* URLs (unless you've changed something or your theme is not handling this) and it takes a little bit of time for Google to figure that out.