seo.hidden only works for storefront search, not for search engine index anymore

[Havik]

Hi all,

Just to give context on this issue. Last time, from our prior understanding, the seo.hidden will work to hide active products from the storefront search and as well as it remove the actual canonical url from the sitemap thus it's not indexable from search engine like Google, Bing etc. 

But we did have a tag-based noindex, nofollow meta tag in the header in theme.liquid. So, there certain use-case we have have that require one of them is active. For example, we usually have some products that is available to search on the storefront but the link is not indexable for storefront re-direction. Or, we have add-on products that are duplicates of our catalog but on a different tier of pricing.

Usually, having seo.hidden is enough to take it off both storefront and sitemap index, thus we have a lot of products actually didn't have the tag-based noindex nofollow meta tag active (yes, it's an oversight). But very recently, like early this month, we found search results that have these products available to customers, while having active seo.hidden, leading to CX problems. We didn't have any issue of this year.

Just to gather some information if the there's a recent change to how the seo.hidden works and there's a new way to disable one or both storefront and sitemap index together. Or the method of checkmarking seo.hidden active and have meta tag active is the way to go forward from now on.

Thanks for reading this through and much appreciate any feedbacks.

Edit: Just to add more note on this, the products we recently found to having problems, is new products that was launched last month and we have enabled seo.hidden very early before the product is active even and this has been our SOP to onboard products. So, this is a new issue to us. Thanks.

[Havik]

Hi Audrey, 

Thanks for giving feedback on this issue. As the points pointed out by you is valid and is the go-to for managing links and SEO for most cases but unfortunately, this is not the answer I hoping for.

As, the issue only arise after we newly onboard new products recently, like last month and seo.hidden was active before the product is active and there's no backlinks to it whatsoever. So, this is a new issue to us.

But again, thank you for commenting and giving feedback. 

[Havik · Accepted solution]

After pulling my eye hair going through all the product and the metafield one by one, I finally found the issue of the seo.hidden problem. Somehow, seo.hidden of the affected product is the wrong type, from integer to single line text . For example shown in the picture below,

as compared to a normal product which as below,

This happened when one of our product creation script, that interact with Shopify Admin GraphQL. We had to bump the version in a while back thus we had to rewrite a lot of our fucntion to cater the new GQL schema that shopify introduce. During that time, the field was accidentally changed type and got overlooked in the PR. Now, we have rectify this problem but we had a lot of clean up to do.

I don't know how this happen and how Shopify just let the same metafield to have 2 different metafield type but it happen 🙃
Hope you guys learn from my spiritual experience and I hope to save a lot of time and headache for any future people that have this problem.

TLDR; SAME METAFIELD SOMEHOW HAVE 2 METAFIELD TYPES. BE CAREFUL WHEN INTERACTING THE ADMIN GQL.