Page blocked by robots.txt

[Sarah441]

I have 2 pages that Google Search Console says are indexed, but blocked by robots.txt. I went through the shopify help article and got to the point shown in the screenshot. I need help with next steps. Shopify support couldn't help me.

[ilanadavis]

Shopify blocks policy pages in the robots.txt file because they usually aren't helpful for people when searching for products.

If you go to your live robots.txt page, you'll see Shopify has the following which is expected.

Disallow: /policies/
Disallow: /*/policies/

[Sarah441]

I'm not sure how this helps me. I do not understand coding. 

[ilanadavis · Accepted solution]

Hey @Sarah441 It wasn't meant for you to code something, sorry for my lack of clarity.

My comment was that there is nothing you need to do. Your policy pages should not be indexed and Shopify is doing exactly what they should be doing. What's happened here is that you're linking to your policy page from a product page that is indexed. Google will attempt to crawl all links they see. In this case, they "see" the policy page because it's linked to from the product page so Google indexed the policy page. But Shopify is saying "Wait, we don't want this indexed, please don't spend resources crawling this page."

So Google will then send you a notice (your screenshot from Search Console) that says we see this policy page because it's linked, but we're not doing anything else with it. If you don't want that, take action.

But Google is doing exactly what you want it to do, so there is no action required. You can ignore that particular issue.

Additionally, if you are not a developer, I wouldn't go futzing with creating a robots.txt file outside of Shopify's. You'd have to maintain that and any future changes.

In summary, leave it as it is and focus on more important areas of growing your business.

[aannett]

I'm currently dealing with Google Merchant blocking all of my products and suspending my account for "misrepresentation." To prevent this from happening, Google wants to see the policy and cart pages on your site. I tried to allow the pages Shopify has blocked in order to be indexed by Google and hopefully get my products accepted, but it seems as though Shopify overrides the code I wrote to allow those pages.

[KieranR]

Just publish a /page/privacy and /page/tc and you'll be set

[KieranR]

There are dev docs that show this exact example.

From here: https://shopify.dev/docs/storefronts/themes/seo/robots-txt#remove-a-default-rule-from-an-existing-gr... 

So basically replace the group.rules for rule in your template with the one from example.

But personally, this seems like such a minor issue to even bother fixing. But if you're committed to fixing it, being unsure about Liquid coding means you run the risk of breaking it more than fixing it. A single character wrong could block all your product or collection pages for example...