Has your website been affected by spam links and back links Shopify not listening!

[ElaineClaire]

If you haven't already you might want to check your website on Google search console. There are many many websites that have been affected by this hack and you may not realise.

You will see pages indexed that are not actually part of your website but are spam links and they look like japanese characters. They are links from really bad sites, that shouldn't be on the internet. Such as **bleep** and gambling and have the  potential to hurt your website and your reputation! It will also degrade your Domain Authority which is used for your google ranking!

The problem first started with a loophole in the collection/vendors? and now it has moved the the search facility.

See Screen shot below!

If you have been affected by this can you please respond to my post, it would be good to get an idea of how many people are affected by this.

SHOPIFY what are you doing about this?

[Josh_Uebergang]

This is not really a hack. Third-parties just enter in search queries within a public URL then get them indexed. I'm seeing this happen more and more with client websites.

I am yet to pin-point what the third-parties are doing to get the links indexed. Simply typing in a search query will not get them indexed or even crawled. The pages are also not internally linked or visible in the sitemap. That makes me think there are backlinks from other pages which gets them crawled.

[lrfielding]

But they are being indexed, despite robots.txt being set up. Any more advice here from Shopify?

[Lucy_Gibson]

Hi Elaine, 

We have the same issue but not with search. It's being appended into our auto generated shopify pages - collections/all. Josh is correct in that it's not a hack but an exploit but as usually Shopify is slow to respond and act. 
Shopify support keeps telling me to disavow INTERNAL links, which is so unorthodox little documentation exists on it and what little does exist states DO NOT do that. 

We've blocked them in x robots tag, sitemap and robots.txt. 

[WMMINC]

Just encountered the same issue with spam in the "collections all". I did some searching and see that this. Diablo 4 spam tagging is EVERYWHERE right now. Still confused how they did this. 

[creationacc]

Empty Collections/all/XXXX are targetted.

Can you detail "blocked in x robots"  ?

Also, how did you block them in sitemap  ?

thank you

[cyclists-com]

I have also noticed that my site has many links of this type. Is there any known fix?

[dlevens]

We are having this issue still as of Jan 2024. It is affecting our /collections/vendors? and /search? and Shopify is still not blocking them. I have links still coming in using this format /collections/vendors?constraint=

I have not created my own robots.txt, I have let Shopify manage this and their default settings are blocking search links with this entry in robots.txt 

Disallow: /search

But they are not blocking the vendors links

Does anyone know how we edit our robots.txt? Any blocks you all can share that have worked for you? Shopify does not seem to be helping much here.

[ulrichK]

Hi Guys, My Shopify Shop site has been blocked by Spamhaus for over a month now. Shopify is no help whatsoever, they blame it on a third party, It has nothing to do with them, they say! Even though they are my Hosting Provider, and I purchased the Domain name through them.

I never sent out any email marketing from the Shop, so it has nothing with email. It's all about the DNS settings, and I consider that a problem with Shopify.

Does anyone have the same problem?? Spamhaus is impossible to deal with. I just canceled my Shopify Account cause I am paying for a Shop I can't access.