Page indexing  Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag

[Sandy231]

Hi everyone.  The last couple of weeks I have started the week with error messages from the Google search console.  My question for this week relates to page indexing.  What is it? and why are we now receiving messages that the bot can't index our pages?  Isn't it important for the pages to be found?
Thanks in advance

[Jason]

What page/url? Without an example of that it's hard to know if this is something you should be concerned about or not. It's quite possible it's a page that you don't want indexed but lets get an example to be sure.

[Sandy231]

Hi Jason thanks for the response. We have 103 pages which are affected and
they are all product pages. This is one example:
https://driftedoff.com.au/web-pixels-manager@0.0.222@c47c23e3w3a721ec0p71746530m9141fdea/sandbox/pro...
What does the indexing do?

[Miss_Hula]

Did you find a fix for this? I have the same on Hula Beach. I suddenly have 236 web-pixels-manager pages coming up under the noindex tag error.

[Sandy231]

Hi Sorry I have had no fix for the problem.  Jason was the only one to reply and no information from Shopify as to what the problem is or how to fix it.

[alritz]

Same issue, any fix on this? Google keeps notify on this issue

[Emma_Robson]

Hi Sandy, we have the same message for 241 URLs, but looking at the URL you gave Jason, I noticed that all of ours are also sandbox URLs, so my question is to Jason: does this actually matter as far as our live websites are concerned? Thanks.

[Feemish]

Same here.

I have just had an email from Search console saying that all my collection pages are no longer indexed.. the graph shows they were all indexed until 3 days ago.
the reason
Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag

However checking the source code for the live collection pages does not show any 'noindex' tag.

For example this page is appearing in search console as 'not indexed'
https://www.arka-shop.co.uk/collections/bali-silver-hoop-earrings

Inspecting the URL within search console show it as 'Not on google' 

Indexing allowed?

error

No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag

But testing it here show that there are not any 'noindex' tags present.
https://seositecheckup.com/tools/noindex-tag-test

This is all very odd and worrying

[Feemish]

There seems to be an issue with Shopify. Some apps are finding that some change at Shopify is causing a 'noindex' tag to be added to their collection pages!
I advise everyone to check if their collection pages are being excluded by Google. Mine are!

I can't think of a more serious problem!   5 days ago my collection pages were taken off google.

Check your Google Search Console.
>> Page indexingExcluded by ‘noindex’ tag

[73Sophie]

We are having the same problem. In our case it is being caused by Boost Product Filter and Search app. They are blaming Shopify for it, saying they have made changes that have affected their code. 

[Emma_Robson]

If this of help at all, I reach out to Shopify support and this is the reply that I received, so I am no longer concerned but would appreciate any fedback if anyone thinks we still need to be (as my number of pages affected is steadily growing):

Hi Emma,

Thanks for your response.

I did have a look and it seems like by default, Shopify's Taste theme uses the noindex tag to prevent search engines from indexing pages like the cart, checkout, and customer pages. This is intended so it doesn't show unintended pages on Search Engines. Within Google's email, did it show this was causing any issues or was this just a notification of having a large amount of non indexed pages.

You can learn more about hiding a page from search engines in this article which would clarify further on why and how these pages are excluded by the noindex tag.

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us again.

Kind Regards,

Hanjun N | Shopify Support Advisor

[Sandy231]

Hi Emma I am glad that you managed to get some response from shopify and thanks for posting the information you received.  Maybe we should all try to contact support.  Unfortunately I don't use the Taste theme so the response doesn't apply to us.  Glad your problem is sorted.

[SDDesigns]

I am having the same issue.  In looking at Google Search Console, in early March my indexed pages went from about 85,000 to 22,000. Did anyone else get an answer on this? No changes on my end should have caused this change. I have many products now excluded by 'no index' tag. My collections and pages are indexed, just not many of my products now.

simpledesertdesigns.com

[Feemish]

not sure this is the same issue, as the 'Boost' problem was only affecting collection pages.