Blog Posts, Sitemaps & Robots.txt issues

[Hellwood_Outfit]

Was checking out all things SEO and discovered that none of my blog pages are being indexed by Google. I checked out my sitemaps and while I have one for products and pages and collections I don't have one for blogs. Went through the help pages and got a little stuck as they all say that Shopify should include published blog posts in the sitemap automatically, in my case it appears that they don't. 

Dug a little deeper and found that there is a 'no index' error on Google so I went to check my robots.txt and discovered that /blogs/ is being disallowed, which I'm guessing is why my blog posts aren't indexing. But when I tried to edit my robots.txt, following the help pages guidance again, I ran into an issue that the edit code section doesn't allow me to create a new template in robots.txt, it doesn't appear as an option. I do have a robots.txt.liquid template already there but the text in it doesn't look anything like the robots.txt I've got and I don't want to start tinkering because of this.

Can anyone offer any suggestions as how best to proceed?

[ilanadavis]

You're blogs are being indexed, it just takes a while.  

In your sitemap, you'll see

Disallow: /blogs/*+*

This just means don't look at the blog URLs that include spaces (the plus symbol + and 2B means spaces) which are usually from tags. Google will still crawl and index your blog posts as long as they don't have spaces in the URL. It's impossible to have spaces in your blog post URL when you create a blog post because Shopify automatically adds dashes to the URL. So spaces would only come from tags.

In Search Console, select your Sitemap.xml file. You should then see at least 4 sub sitemaps. One for blogs, one for collections, one for products, and one for pages. 

Your robots file tells Google if they should crawl pages or not.

Your sitemap tells Google what the structure of your site looks like.

All that to say I'm seeing your blog posts in search results, it just takes time.

 

[Hellwood_Outfit]

Thanks for that but I think you might have missed a couple of points. The blog posts that are indexed are only indexed because either I manually indexed them through GSC or because they have been picked up from a trawl of a different site. One was indexed because it appeared on Pinterest and the other via some odd sounding Chinese bing site. When I visit hellwoodoutfitters.com/sitemap.xml it only lists three sitemaps, products, pages and collections. There is no sitemap being generated for the blog. Very confused.

[ilanadavis]

Ahh, I see it now. You have a noindex, nofollow set on your main blog page, preventing your blog posts from being included in the sitemaps.

Go to view-source:https://hellwoodoutfitters.com/blogs/hellwood-outfitters

Search for noidex

 

[Hellwood_Outfit]

Ah I see. Would you happen to have any clue as to how I would go about removing that? 

[ilanadavis]

Check to see if you have the seo.hidden metafield set or if you have an SEO app that is assigning the noindex.