2000 non-indexed pages while I only have about 43 pages. All are duplicate product pages.

[Maxie0808]

Hey all!

I am trying to figure out what is going on here. On Search Console my sitemap has 41 indexed pages and 2 are non-indexed. When I go to the "All known pages" tab it shows me that there are 2.38K non-indexed pages and 44 indexed. As far as I can see, all of these non-indexed pages are products in my store. 

As an example, there is one specific product for which there are 52 different (all working) URL's showing up under the non-indexed pages. They all have a canonical tag to the 'main' products URL. 

Does someone know what could be going on here? Does this effect SEO? I appreciate all help!

[TR_Page · Accepted solution]

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, no. The reason this happens or I guess maybe that you're seeing this all of a sudden is you've probably relatively recently updated to Online Store 2.0 from a vintage theme or have only just started utilizing storefront filtering on your shop.

Google is just letting you know what's going on and this is not a bad thing, provided we're still indexing pages we actually want indexed. You'll see an increase here because Online Store 2.0 themes and storefront filtering leverages URL paths in order to complete searches. If you do an export of a lot of these pages, you'll see a lot of instances where the URL contains `filter` `search` and `sort_by` these are just your customers using the tools to navigate your shop. In a way, it's a good thing in that it's validating the tools are being used.

As far as  whether or not it's a bad thing, some SEOs will complain that this eats up the "crawl budget" and they're worried about this. However, as long as Google continues indexing pages it's supposed to and you keep working on making sure it's high-quality content you're putting on the site, you'll see no problems.

One shop I'm working in right now has over 120,000 of these pages that are not being indexed. Google is just letting you know, "hey I see these but I'm not doing anything with them." Provided you do occasional checks to make sure that the right pages are being indexed it's fine as long as canonical URLs are set up it won't be a problem.

[SEOAnt-Zoey]

You don't need to worry about it，
because they are all "duplicate pages". Just like you said you have 43 page, but it told you that 2000 pages are not indexed.

Google will basically only index one page it considers to be a canonical page in a group of duplicate pages (referring to different URL names, but the content is exactly the same). Google has its own algorithm to identify canonical pages, which we cannot control. Even if the Shopify page has the code for specifying the canonical page, Google will refer to the one you specify, but the canonical page actually identified by Google will be different from the page you specify.