Re: Website hacked ?! - HELP

Solved

How can I remove a spam page from my website index?

MVUILL
Explorer
70 0 19

Hi! 

I received an alert from google search console saying they excluded a page from indexation, and when I look at the page it's spam publicity: 

 

MVUILL_0-1663842242468.png

URL : https://www.french-address.com/collections/vendors?q=Buy%20FUT%2023%20coins%2C%20Cheap%20FIFA%2023%2...

 

How can I delete this page, I can't find it anywhere? 

Thx for your help!!

Accepted Solutions (2)

Shay
Shopify Staff (Retired)
3110 472 657

This is an accepted solution.

Hi @MVUILL 

 

I can definitely understand your concern! Based on the URL you shared it looks like this might be a collection created within your admin or possible from the new Shopify Collabs service. 

 

The "spammy" content of that page you shared is what appears to be the collection page title. If you still cannot find this page within your store admin please reach out to our live support team for additional help with this. 

 

Please know that our theme and technical support team may be limited in what they can do depending on where/how this page was created. We generally can only support theme edits on our own in-house themes or technical issues that resolve around the Shopify platform itself. That doesn't mean they won't do everything they can to help you get this resolved! 

 

To contact live support please follow this link: Contact Support - Shopify Help Center.

Shay | Social Care @ Shopify 
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View solution in original post

Shay
Shopify Staff (Retired)
3110 472 657

This is an accepted solution.

Thank you @NEI-Arlene for that additional information and your open tickets about this situation. I have connected with our security team about this concern and I can share some insight and best next steps to get this resolved. 

 

When reviewing these links, it is important to understand how they function and how they were initially created.

 

Example URL: https://www.yourstoreurlhere.com/collections/vendors?q=test 

 

The "?q=" in the URL is sending a search query to the website in the first part of the url structure and it is searching for whatever is placed after the URL. 

 

If you went to your own website and added "/collections/vendors?q=test" to the end of your store address and hit enter, you would see a page show up with the page title being "test" and no products found. These URLs can be made by anyone and will generally work on any website with a search function. 

 

Malicious external websites will create these empty backlinks to store URLs to help promote their services or products by using the search query on the website to generate a page with their product details as the title. The page itself doesn't exist independently, it only exists as part of a search result on the website being targeted. 

 

How to disavow these backlinks from Google.

 

 

Using a SEO reporting software you can collect all the bad backlinks into a .txt file and report them via Google's Disavow Tool. Full steps on how to do this are in the link. (NOTE: the backlinks you need to list will be the referral site address rather than the search term URL.)


Please note the following warning on Google Search Console:

 

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site's performance in Google's search results. We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe that there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.

Also, a great resource to learn more about how backlinks work: How to Stop Spam Backlinks from Ruining Your Google Reputation.

 

If you have any concerns about reporting these backlinks to Google or researching more information on your website's SEO then I recommend hiring an expert from our expert marketplace that specialize in this field and can assist you further: Hire Shopify Experts, developers, designers and freelancers.

 

Edited to add: There is another forum thread in the community here with a possible solution for stopping these kinds of backlinks from working:  Solved: Re: Has my site been hacked? 

Shay | Social Care @ Shopify 
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 - Was your question answered? Mark it as an Accepted Solution
 - To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Shopify Blog

View solution in original post

Replies 223 (223)
Allan-EP
Shopify Partner
32 0 68

The %- and -% will work just the same as %. All the "-" does is removes whitespace in the output, which is useful/necessary in some cases.   

Participant
Excursionist
14 0 2

In an effort to help others who are currently feeling as lost and overwhelmed as I initially was when I first encountered this issue (and then this thread which lacks an official and concise solution from Shopify), I am compiling a shortlist of the 3 steps that our store has taken.

 

Please note that I am not a coder or SEO expert. I am simply listing what I interpret to be the most easily-implemented (but effective) steps out of those which others have generously posted earlier in this thread.

 

1.
In theme.liquid, between <head> and </head>:

{% if request.path == '/collections/vendors' and collection.all_products_count == 0 %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
{% endif %}


2.
In collection-template.liquid:

{% if collection.id or collection.products.size > 0 %}
<h1>{{ collection.title }}</h1>
{% endif %}


3.
Using Google Search Console:

Indexing > Removals > Temporary Removals

- Hit "New Request" button
- Enter URL: https://yourwebsite.com/collections/vendors?q=
(replacing "yourwebsite" with the name of your actual site)
- select "Remove all URLs with this prefix"

Vicky6
Excursionist
25 0 3

@Participant, in your summary of solutions being discussed, you didn't mention using the disavow tool for URLs and domains (outside of our own) that we find are linking to our site and are obviously spam.

 

I found some showing up in my search.google.com/search-console/insights/ under "Referring links from other websites" as well as search.google.com/search-console/links under "external links."

 

Can an SEO person, such as @Greg-Bernhardt, please chime in and answer this... Should I go ahead and disavow those now? I'm confused on the conversation about if/when it's OK to do that.

 

Thanks @Participant for your summary post. It saves newcomers a lot of back searching to have a current summary. Maybe once we hear from Shopify's @Greg-Bernhardt, we can update it to include the disavow recommendation parameters. 

Trevor
Shopify Staff (Retired)
3408 463 1013

Hey, everyone. 

 

Thank you for taking the time to flag this issue in the Community. A special thanks to @Allan-EP , @Shay and @Greg-Bernhardt for helping champion this thread to provide workarounds and awareness. 

 

The issue has been raised with our internal teams for further review. We do not have a timeframe we can provide on a fix, but I will update you once a fix has been implemented. In the meantime, please use the workarounds provided in this thread.

 

Trevor | Community Moderator @ Shopify
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 - Was your question answered? Mark it as an Accepted Solution
 - To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Shopify Blog

Participant
Excursionist
14 0 2

@Trevor You mentioned "the workarounds provided in this thread."

 

While there have been several helpful folks who have been chipping in here, we ultimately do not have a concise workaround that we can use. That is, because Shopify has not provided store owners with any officially-vetted code, or official instructions, what we have is a hodgepodge of code suggestions which (if not implemented correctly) might harm either the functionality of the stores, or harm their hard-fought Google rankings.

 

It is not only ridiculous, but inexcusable, that at this very late stage in this spam vulnerability problem that we are being asked to sift through this forum in order to try and cobble together a code solution that will put a bandaid on this.

 

So, please, can we at least receive a post from someone at the appropriate Shopify team where they can perhaps edit together, into a single post, a code solution that we can all draw from?

Trevor
Shopify Staff (Retired)
3408 463 1013

Hello, again! 

 

Our developers have recently shipped a change that will generate a 404 page if the vendor is unknown (based on query string). The change will block it from indexing on Google. These changes will only apply to vendor pages, but our teams will investigate whether other pages may be vulnerable to this abuse.

 

This change is rolling out platform wide as we speak, so it may take some time for you to see these changes implemented. However, moving forward, this should help mitigate the ability spammers have with taking advantage of the query print out to advertise their spam links. 

A special thanks to @ who helped bring this to fruition. 

Trevor | Community Moderator @ Shopify
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 - Was your question answered? Mark it as an Accepted Solution
 - To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Shopify Blog

Vicky6
Excursionist
25 0 3

@Trevor this is GREAT news. I just tried on of my spammy links that are indexed and it displayed one of my main pages which is WAY better than just the page just showing a bunch of Chinese spam. Just wanted you to know it's not kicking a 404 page for me yet. Maybe it will later? Not sure if the way it is right now will fix the problem so Google no longer indexes it? If so, I'm fine with it. 

 

https://tutu.com/pages/shop-products-services?q=%E5%81%9A%E5%81%87%E5%90%88%E6%A0%BC%E8%AF%81%E9%9C%...

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

We're starting to see these pages go 404. It's just a matter of caches being cleared naturally through the system. Keep checking over the next 24hrs and if you don't see them update to 404 please let us know. It will take Google perhaps many days to deindex these pages, but it will happen eventually. Thanks to all the participants in this thread for your patience, creativity and willingness to support each other.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

shadi1
Explorer
74 1 49

Awesome finally good news.

But i wanted to ask we can keep this fix for now:

1.
In theme.liquid, between <head> and </head>:

{% if request.path == '/collections/vendors' and collection.all_products_count == 0 %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
{% endif %}

 

It doesn't hurt until google slow indexing catches up, what you think?

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

@shadi1 consider the instance where you have a vendor whom you commonly introduce and remove products. Your relationship with the vendor is stable. You'd want that page whether or not you had products on any given day to remain in the index and building page equity. If you tell Google to deindex the page every time you have no products currently for that vendor then it's like whiplash to Google and you can lose page equiity.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

rguerrerogzz
Visitor
1 0 0

Thanks for the update. So can I just leave this alone and the problem will solve itself? Will google automatically de index the URLs? No need to do a Temporarily remove URL in search console?

Screen Shot 2023-01-11 at 19.09.12.jpeg

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

@rguerrerogzz yes it will fix itself and if anyone is blocked via robots.txt you'll need to remove that for Google to see the 404.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Jesper_Skaane_B
Excursionist
25 0 4

Greetings @Greg-Bernhardt and thank you for letting us know.
I am not mega-tech on SEO, but will all the spammy links now be considered 404's? and if so, will this not generate thousands of 404's in googles index, which will hurts ones SEO ?

I was under the impression that it is very important not to have 404s on ones website?

Ogap31
Shopify Partner
15 0 1

Hi @Greg-Bernhardt, first of all thank you for your valuable insights.
I agree with @Jesper_Skaane_B about his concern about 404 error pages. Wouldn't this be detrimental to SEO?
My question is: these pages now tagged in 404 error, will be thereafter not indexed? Do not 404 error pages not indexed harm the SEO ? Will these pages be permanently deleted? And if yes, can we already do it manually via Google Search Console?

 

Thank you very much for your answers !

Hugo.

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

@Jesper_Skaane_B and @Ogap31, rest well, there is zero concern. Remember these pages are trash. You want to be rid of them and communicate to Google that they have been removed ASAP. This is what Google wants. They want to index high-quality content. Throwing out the trash when your yard is full of it, only improves your property. Also remember you don't control external backlinks. Google does not hold you responsible if there are no signals that you created them. The only time 404s are a concern is if you have many internal links that you do control are 404ing that you should clean up internally on your site or if by mistake a high-quality page is 404ing. Again, think of this as someone dumped trash all over your lawn. You want to first clean it up and then let the city inspector know you cleaned it up.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Ogap31
Shopify Partner
15 0 1

Thank you @Greg-Bernhardt for your answer!

However, for Google to deindex a page with a 404 error, it can take several months on small sites.

So I have 2 questions:

- If I temporarily remove the index on the affected pages, I know that it removes them from the results for 90 days. But will my SEO still be affected at the same level since Google will be able to crawl during this suspension in order to deindex my pages?

- Can I use the "Disavow" function to speed up the process on the following prefix: https://www.website/collections/vendors?q=

 

My main constraint is that I would not like to have to wait several weeks or months to see all of these pages being deindexed.

I thank you in advance for your answers and I wish you a good day 🙂
Hugo

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

Hi @Ogap31,

Several months would surprise me. I think it will be weeks. The removal tool in GSC only hides the URL from within the search results. It won't help in this case, nor the disavow tool which works on external URLs linking to you, not your own pages, but again, it wouldn't help in this case. All you can do is be patient and focus on other areas of your shop.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Participant
Excursionist
14 0 2

@Greg-Bernhardt

Thank you for your continued input.

 

I have two questions:

 

1.
Re: " You want to...communicate to Google that they have been removed ASAP"

Could you please tell us how we are to do that?


2.
Re: "It won't help in this case, nor the disavow tool which works on external URLs linking to you..."

Are you saying that we should not use Google Search Console to inform Google that the external URLs are bad? That our best course of action right now is to turn a blind eye to those? I am not trying to be sarcastic with this question. I am just looking to clarify exactly what it is that we should do or not do, and what we should ignore.


Lastly, something for the Shopify "suggestion box" (if such a thing exists):

I am shocked that there still is no Help Center article on this very important issue. With that in mind, I can only deduce that Shopify is perfectly happy watching us toil away in this thread to try and figure out all the various things we need to do to undo this spam problem. Users (and Shopify employees) would greatly benefit from a Help Center article which includes a FAQ — something that we can all draw from, and point to. Without it, we will continue going back and forth with questions, answers, and misunderstandings.

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

Hi @Participant,

  1.  This is the purpose of the platform fix that we shipped. When Google recrawls they will see the trash is gone and will remove anything it has from the index.
  2. Correct, we've had plenty of communication from Google reps who state they are very good at recognizing these spam patterns, and nothing is needed from the website owner.
  3. I'll leave this unanswered because I am not on the support or docs team.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Participant
Excursionist
14 0 2

@Greg-Bernhardt ,

 

If I am understanding what you are saying, I am getting the impression that our store should remove the three changes below which we implemented a few days ago. That is, should we "undo" these changes:


1.
In theme.liquid, between <head> and </head>:

{% if request.path == '/collections/vendors' and collection.all_products_count == 0 %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
{% endif %}


2.
In collection-template.liquid:

{% if collection.id or collection.products.size > 0 %}
<h1>{{ collection.title }}</h1>
{% endif %}


3.
Using Google Search Console:

Indexing > Removals > Temporary Removals

- Hit "New Request" button
- Enter URL: https://yourwebsite.com/collections/vendors?q=
(replacing "yourwebsite" with the name of your actual site)
- select "Remove all URLs with this prefix"

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

@Participant 

  1. Yes, there could be legit reasons to have a category with no products be indexable
  2. Yes
  3. Unnecessary to change

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Participant
Excursionist
14 0 2

@Greg-Bernhardt 

 

Thanks very much for that info.

 

Regarding point #1:
Our site does not have any "vendors" other than our own company (we sell our own products). So, when I create a product page in Shopify, I put our company name in the "Vendor" field. With that in mind, if a customer should stumble upon this page on our site...

 

.../collections/vendors

 

...they will only see this text:

"No products found in this collection"

 

(Whereas if a customer visits .../collections (without "/vendors"), they will see all of our Collections on a single page.

 

So, as we have no intention of adding any third party vendors, and as the .../collections/vendors page will only ever show "No products found in this collection", I am wondering if we should keep the code below in place (as I do not see any benefit to having Google index a page that always says "No products found").

 

Or, is there something that I might be unaware of, which would make us want to have Google index that type of "No products found" page?

 

The code in question:

 

In theme.liquid, between <head> and </head>:

{% if request.path == '/collections/vendors' and collection.all_products_count == 0 %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
{% endif %}

Jesper_Skaane_B
Excursionist
25 0 4

@Greg-BernhardtThanks for the answers.

The two things i did before the fix is:
- Added this disallow in Robots.txt: Disallow: /collections/vendors*
- In google Search Console, i went to removals --> temporary removals --> New request and ""remove all URLs with this prefix"

Should i roll back these two fixes?

z285chen
Tourist
8 0 1

Finally, the right things have been done by Shopify. We are now just waiting for the comeback of our SEO rankings.

Vicky6
Excursionist
25 0 3

Hi @Greg-Bernhardt It's been 24 hours and my indexed spam pages are still not showing a 404 page. Should I be seeing a 404 page when I now open an indexed spam URL? Shopify is currently redirecting any indexed spam URL starting with https://tutu.com/collections/vendors?q= [followed by the Chinese spam] to https://tutu.com/pages/shop-products-services?q= [followed by the Chinese spam]. How will that effect me? It's nice not to see Chinese spam on the page but I want to be sure this will have the same desired effect as rendering a 404 / dropping them from the index. I could be not understanding how this works. If so, thanks in advance for an explanation. 

 

Try https://tutu.com/collections/vendors?q=%E5%81%9A%E5%81%87%E5%90%88%E6%A0%BC%E8%AF%81%E9%9C%80%E8%B4%... to see what I see. 

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

Hi @Vicky, correct I'm seeing the 301 which will override the 404. You'll need to remove the 301 implementations. Is that something you, a dev or an addon is doing?

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Alexis_Théry
Shopify Partner
15 0 5

Thanks @Greg-Bernhardt for the solution you gave us concerning the issue /collections/vendors

 

To resume Shopify made a change and now url are all in 404. But i am wondering what can be the seo impact having finally thousand and thousands 404 url on search console?

 

Since this is resolved the community  ( thanks @Maxime_Breton_V  and @Maelb22 )   notice a new attack on the search?q   

What are the final solution on this point?

 

Then A new problem started last week thousand of website are attack with bad url generated 

https://mywebsite/web-pixels-manager@0.0.186/sandbox/products/.....

Capture d’écran 2023-01-28 à 16.38.57.png

 

Thousand of theme  are indexate and if you do a research on google i notice many shopify website are attacked (see below)

Capture d’écran 2023-01-28 à 16.38.05.png

 

This attack is describe here:

 https://community.shopify.com/c/technical-q-a/shopify-bug-web-pixels-manager-sandbox/td-p/1906981

 

 

Can you tell us what to do exactly on this problem?

When shopify will do a global communication on all this attack????

We all really feel abandoned since a few months by shopify !

 

Thank you for help us.

 

Alexis THERY

 

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

@Alexis_Théry rest easy the 404s are no issue. If someone dumps garbage on your lawn. Is the inspector angry that they are gone?

 

The pixel pages are now 404 as described in the thread. Please continue to seek support for that issue in that thread.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Vicky6
Excursionist
25 0 3

Thanks @Alexis_Théry  for bringing this to my attention and showing us how to search to see if I'm effected. It did show up for me but only 3 instances on the same URL. Still not fully recovered from the collections/vendors?q= exploitation, this seems rough. 

 

** I appreciate this community board so much ** and how some very smart people are sharing their knowledge with the rest of us small to medium shop owners who can't afford an expert every time something like this happens. I'm happy to see Shopify hope on this issue more quickly than collections/vendor. 

DaveSweetCures
Excursionist
18 0 16

Just a word of warning to any impacted by the vendor issue, is there is also potentially an issue with sites using a search functionality i.e. /search?q=. We've followed steps that we did previously to address the vendor query issue, but I'd advise anyone impacted by the /vendor?q= issue to also look at setup for search queries.

See search console screenshot below: 

*The new search query issue started around the 10th of Jan 2023.

Screenshot 2023-01-16 at 10.54.56.png




JenDeg
Excursionist
10 0 3

Hi Dave,

 

Have you found a code solution for the search queries? If so, I'd really love to know what it is and implement it. Thanks much ~Jen

Allan-EP
Shopify Partner
32 0 68

@JenDeg A solution for search terms might be a little trickier since very often sites will show something like "your search for 'some search term' found N results", so outputting the value of ?q= from the URL is desired and expected. 

 

My suggestion would be to do something like: 

 

 

<h1>
{%- if search.results_count == 0 -%}
No results found
{%- else -%}
The default page title output (which might be a language snippet)
{%- endif -%}
</h1>

 

This would keep the spam search queries from outputting their garbage to the page while still being useful to the user as a "none found" message. 

z285chen
Tourist
8 0 1

Yeah, we found the same issue as well. Any solution, Shopify?

Maxime_Breton_V
Excursionist
13 0 7

Same issue here with the spam pages going up again.

 

The "Vendors" issue is fixed.

 

However, a new "/search?q=" issue has now started.

 

The number of spam  pages being indexed is going up once again. The spammers are abusing the /search?q= function to create spam pages.

 

I believe the spammers will switch over to the /search?q= exploit for all Shopify websites as the /search?q= issue has been patched.

 

Any solutions for this? I think we would all prefer not having another million spam pages being indexed...

Maxime_Breton_V
Excursionist
13 0 7

As a follow-up to my previous post, I suppose we would have to follow the same steps to mark as no-index the spam pages generated from the "search" exploit.

 

Does anyone more tech-savvy know if the following code would work if added in the head section of theme.liquid :

 

{%- if request.path == '/search' -%}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

 

Unless I am mistaken, this would mark as noindex any page generated through the search function.

 

Thank you for everyone's help!

Allan-EP
Shopify Partner
32 0 68

@Maxime_Breton_V You can use the following to noindex a search results page:

 

{%- if search.performed -%}
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
{%- endif -%}
Maelb22
Tourist
10 0 10

Hi everyone,

 

As Maxime, I have the same spam behavior with search?q template page.

 

I anticipated, when I saw the problem with vendors pages, several weeks ago, in defining these search page as noindex. Also, as already explained by most of shopify owner in this discussion, this correction as "noindex" is not a complete solution. For example, I have spam "search pages" indexed, despite the noindex code put in place. Also, my website is completely desindexed from the bing reasearch...

 

To Shopify team : please, could you quickly put in place the same correction as for vendors page ? When search gives no results => define the "result page" as 404. I think this is a pretty simple modification to do.

 

For me, the 404 modification for vendors page really performed. In some days, the problem was resolved and all spam "vendors pages" was desindexed after this modification.

 

In waiting, to other shopify owner :

 

You could add this code to your theme.liquid, to avoid the spam text in your title "search page" :

 

{% if template contains 'search' and search.results_count == 0 %}
<title>Define the text you want</title>
{%- else %}........

 

To avoid to have a spam text on H1, modify the code in the search.liquid :

{% if search.results_count == 0 %}
<h1 class="top-heading-wrap">{{ 'Define the text your want' }}</h1>

{% else %}....

 

Hope it could be helpful.

Best regards

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

@Maelb22, that is being investigated as well. I think your liquid code will work in the meantime.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Egle
Excursionist
26 0 17

Screen Shot 2023-02-02 at 8.01.40 PM.png

 

Hello, thanks for the help. Does this look good?

Egle
Excursionist
26 0 17

That search "fix" doesn't seem to work cause new links being added for the past three days after I've inputted the code. Also, if you manually re-check the spammy links on the search console, it keeps getting indexed (in the vendors' case, after re-checking, it was immediately dropped).

Maxime_Breton_V
Excursionist
13 0 7

As @Egle  and @Maelb22 have mentioned, the fix for the "Search" exploit does not seem to work.

 

I implemented the suggested fixes (marking the pages as noindex and eliminating the generated text) on January 31st 2023. To this day, new spam pages are still getting indexed. My number of indexed pages is climbing once again and this whole process is getting difficult to manage.

 

As a follow-up regarding Bing, my website is still completely deindexed from Bing since mid-december (start of the "vendors" exploit).

 

Are there any other fixes that can be manually implemented until Shopify solves the "Search" exploit?

 

Thank you!

Egle
Excursionist
26 0 17

From the first attack, when the issue was "/vendors" it took us five months to completely get rid of 16 million indexed pages. During that period, we lost thousands of dollars in revenue, and our traffic from google went almost entirely to zero. At the beginning of January, we started gaining our keyword positions back on google, and traffic started to grow slowly; however, we never returned to the same rankings we had before this attack.

 

After just three weeks, the Shopify stores were hit with another "search" attack, so we have 60,000+ indexed pages instead of our usual 200, and keyword rankings started to fall again from TOP10 positions to 90-100th places.

 

Because of this attack, we have exceeded the "requests for translations" number by Weglot, and for the past five months, we have had only one language instead four.

 

I want to ask Shopify staff who would reimburse thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Who would reimburse money that we paid during the years to SEO agencies that helped us achieve TOP10 positions, and now everything has fallen apart?

 

I don't understand how this takes so long to fix, keeping in mind that even one day is a super important cause; in only one day, you can have 100,000 pages indexed which will take months to get removed and more months afterward to gain back traffic and google ranking positions.

 

I would understand this situation if Shopify support would be helpful, respond to questions, and keep us updated. However, there needs to be more communication from them in either of the communication channels. What's even more bizarre is that when we inquired about this situation through Live Chat, the agent offered us a "fix" which, in his opinion, was for us to download a "Fraud Filter APP" to sort fraudulent orders (which we didn't have at all, and that was complete nonsense).

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

I can confirm devs are working on a broad solution for the search page spam. I'll update when I have information.

 

For now you can manually add the following liquid code to your meta-tags.liquid template:

{%- if request.page_type == 'search' and search.performed and search.results_count == 0 -%}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
{%- endif -%}

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Maxime_Breton_V
Excursionist
13 0 7

Thank you for the update @Greg-Bernhardt.

 

If I do not have a meta-tags.liquid template, where should the code be inserted? I am on Debut theme and there is no such template.

 

Would it be inserted in theme.liquid?

 

Thank you in advance!

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

@Maxime_Breton_V I can't offer guidance on that situation. You may just have to wait for the broad solution unless another member here is familiar with your theme.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

Allan-EP
Shopify Partner
32 0 68

@Maxime_Breton_V Using that code in theme.liquid should be fine. Add it after the opening <head> tag and before the closing </head> tag. 

Greg-Bernhardt
Community Manager
95 1 35

Noindexing of search spam pages is being deployed. It may take several hours to register for some shops.

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

shadi1
Explorer
74 1 49

Great news. So do we keep the code you suggested we add yesterday or should we remove it?

JenDeg
Excursionist
10 0 3

Yes, I'd like to know the answer to this as well.

z285chen
Tourist
8 0 1

Why didn't you 404 those pages as you did to the previous issue?