Technical Q&A

J_19 · ‎01-17-2023

Shopify has a new bug - they are indexing tons of useless pages in Google again. Is there any way to stop this from happening? The code seems to only be editable by shopify since it's in the content_for_header.

Do a google search for:

inurl:/web-pixels-manager@

(https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%2Fweb-pixels-manager%40)

Each site has multiple versions of this page indexed. Peets.com for example has 20.

The pages look blank, but include something like this in the code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Web Pixels Manager Sandbox</title>
    <script id="web-pixels-manager-setup">(function e(e,n,a,o,t){e&&(window.Shopify=window.Shopify||{},window.Shopify.analytics=window.Shopify.analytics||{},window.Shopify.analytics.replayQueue=[],window.Shopify.analytics.publish=function(e,n,a){window.Shopify.analytics.replayQueue.push([e,n,a])});var r,i,s,l,d,c,p,u,f=a+"/"+o+"."+function(){var e="legacy",n="unknown",a=null,o=navigator.userAgent.match(/(Firefox|Chrome)\/(\d+)/i),t=navigator.userAgent.match(/(Edg)\/(\d+)/i),r=navigator.userAgent.match(/(Version)\/(\d+)(.+)(Safari)\/(\d+)/i);r?(n="safari",a=parseInt(r[2],10)):t?(n="edge",a=parseInt(t[2],10)):o&&(n=o[1].toLocaleLowerCase(),a=parseInt(o[2],10));var i={chrome:60,firefox:55,safari:11,edge:80}[n];return void 0!==i&&null!==a&&i<=a&&(e="modern"),e}()+".js";r={src:f,async:!0,onload:function(){if(e){var a=window.webPixelsManager.init(e);n(a),window.Shopify.analytics.replayQueue.forEach((function(e){a.publishCustomEvent(e[0],e[1],e[2])})),window.Shopify.analytics.replayQueue=[],window.Shopify.analytics.publish=a.publishCustomEvent}},onerror:function(){var n=(e.storefrontBaseUrl?e.storefrontBaseUrl.replace(/\/$/,""):self.location.origin)+"/.well-known/shopify/monorail/unstable/produce_batch",a=JSON.stringify({metadata:{event_sent_at_ms:(new Date).getTime()},events:[{schema_id:"web_pixels_manager_load/2.0",payload:{version:t||"latest",page_url:self.location.href,status:"failed",error_msg:f+" has failed to load"},metadata:{event_created_at_ms:(new Date).getTime()}}]});try{if(self.navigator.sendBeacon.bind(self.navigator)(n,a))return!0}catch(e){}const o=new XMLHttpRequest;try{return o.open("POST",n,!0),o.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","text/plain"),o.send(a),!0}catch(e){console&&console.warn&&console.warn("[Web Pixels Manager] Got an unhandled error while logging a load error.")}return!1}},i=document.createElement("script"),s=r.src,l=r.async||!0,d=r.onload,c=r.onerror,p=document.head,u=document.body,i.async=l,i.src=s,d&&i.addEventListener("load",d),c&&i.addEventListener("error",c),p?p.appendChild(i):u?u.appendChild(i):console.error("Did not find a head or body element to append the script")})(null,null,"https://cdn.shopify.com/shopifycloud/web-pixels-manager/0.0.186","sandbox","0.0.186");</script>
  </head>
  <body></body>
</html>

Trevor · ‎05-15-2023

Hello everyone.

Thank you for your patience while we worked towards providing a fix to this issue and building out an FAQ that addresses the primary concerns and questions from this thread. You can find our FAQ on the Community Blog.

We welcome you to continue the conversation in the blog section of the blog post with any valid questions that aren't already answered by the FAQ. We will monitor the comments section for any valid feedback on how this change may impact Shopify stores and will actively remove or edit any comments that spread misinformation or speculation on the issue.

On that, this thread contains some misinformation and speculation on the issue and how it may impact ones online store. For this reason, we will no longer be monitoring this thread, but want to keep it open and available for historical purposes.

We greatly appreciate all of you for bringing this to our awareness and collaborating with us while we worked towards a solution. @Greg-Bernhardt deserves a special shoutout as they have championed this thread and this issue internally.

I'll be marking this as the solution as this has been resolved and helps surface this reply for anyone who may be new to the 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

View solution in original post

Trevor · ‎07-06-2023

Hello,

Thank you for your continued feedback on the web pixels issue. More recent replies have been sharing misinformation or misattribute the issue. For this reason, we've chosen to close this thread.

If you believe you have a new issue that isn't answered by our FAQ, then we'd encourage you to create a new thread in our Technical Q&A board with as much detail as possible.

Thank you.

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

View solution in original post

Pip999 · ‎01-17-2023

Download a no index app via Shopify and add in urls so that google does not crawl page. Then go to google search console and disavow any links.

Seems to be a common occurrence in recent months on Shopify.

J_19 · ‎01-17-2023

What you said has nothing to do with the problem. These pages need deindexed, not blocked from crawling which editing a robots.txt file would do. Also, this has nothing to do with backlinks, so there is nothing to disavow. Thanks, but not helpful.

George_Greenhil · ‎01-23-2023

Hey @J_19 ,

Did you manage to fix this on your store(s)? - noticed I'm getting 1000s indexed like this since last week.

J_19 · ‎01-23-2023

This is a shopify bug - nothing we can do about it. Shopify needs to fix it themselves.

rchadek · ‎01-23-2023

We're experiencing the same issue. Do you know if there's any way to bring this to Shopify support's attention and/or upvote this for a fix?

timvma · ‎01-25-2023

This has happened to me also since the 18th of January

J_19 · ‎01-25-2023

Pretty amazing how agressive Googlebot has been with indexing these pages. In 1 week, Peets.com has grown from 10 to 374. Total indexed went from ~1million up to 10 million as of tonight.

I contacted shopify, so they are aware of this. To fix, they will need to have this script ONLY serve up the javascript instead of now where it serves up javascript+ <head>, <body>, and <html> tags. Additionally, to deindex all the existing pages, they will need to move this javascript file to a new url and ideally 410 error the old url format so it gets out of the index as quickly as possible, but could 301 redirect it to the new url.

George_Greenhil · ‎01-25-2023

Hey @J_19

Seeing the same here in terms of huge new levels of indexation.

I also contacted Shopify to inform them this is happening to basically all merchants on the Shopify platform.

I advised that this could practically destroy some store's SEO and organic rankings if it's not fixed quickly.

Unfortunately support doesn't really seem to understand the issue and/or doesn't seem to be very fast acting on this. There is also no way for them to put me in touch with an SEO specialist from Shopify to explain the bug they have created directly to them. All have to go via general support which dont really understand the urgency.

MaloRGT · ‎01-25-2023

The same here, I contacted them and I insisted on the fact that it is a real urgency to fix ASAP, but it seems they don't understand and don't really try to understand the issue.

Michael_Salerno · ‎01-25-2023

Same issue here. It started to show up last week in Google Search Console. For our site at least, the pages appear to be blank.

If you google "web-pixels-manager" it looks like it's affecting tons of Shopify stores. Maybe every store?

White_Sands · ‎05-04-2023

I've just noticed this with 404 pixel thingy just today going into console (I'm so not technical) and wondered if it's affecting SEO. I've not had any orders for weeks, coming into winter I should be getting a few ugg boot orders now. Hope it's fixed soon! I've been doing redirects as I noticed my pages not found jumped quite a bit, before realising it was something different.....

kbarcant · ‎05-04-2023

@White_Sandsthe reason you have no traffic is because of this shopify error. Legally speaking I can't say it's the reason you have no sales, but it's been verified that this issue is the reason for the drop. Sadly enough there's been no reporting on it but from what I know that won't be the case much longer. Those looking into it are also waiting on Shopify to release their statement so it's a bit of a stand-off.

As a side note, my competitors don't use shopify, they didn't get their ranking taken. My 3 biggest competitors for one store always scored lower than me on the SERP, now they're on the top and I'm in spot 6 or 7 instead of 1 or 2. I spoke to one of my friendly competitors yesterday, their traffic is up since 3/15. Turns out effectively delisting your website from google makes your competitors fill the void for the same search terms.

Mont · ‎05-04-2023

same experience for us...

Greg-Bernhardt · ‎05-04-2023

We're making progress. I anticipate we'll have news very early next week.

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

jackzhu · ‎05-04-2023

@Greg-Bernhardt I have replyed your private message as below

Hi, sorry for late reply as i did not see your message.

Here is the screenshot. You can see our impressions always become lower than before while the not indexed number becomes more and more (If becomes indexed, the impression would lower more violently).

alazandra · ‎05-06-2023

Any update? I am getting 5-15 404 errors on google search console that look like this

https://shopifystore.com/web-pixels-manager@0.0.226@0b28db42w5217fc9ep9e207d62md8042b1d/sandbox/en-f...

Denis_B · ‎05-07-2023

We are approaching 4 months since this Shopify created problem started - still no fix?

kbarcant · ‎05-08-2023

They're supposed to give us news early this week (see page 14 of this thread).

Lets keep our fingers crossed. I'm hopeful this will be the final fix as they truly have identified the root cause.

George_Greenhil · ‎05-10-2023

@Greg-Bernhardt We were advised very early this week but still have no update or PDF/Documentation... We're now almost 5 months since I first reported this issue - when is the update coming?

kbarcant · ‎05-10-2023

The fix needs to be more than a .pdf, it needs to be a collaboration with google to undo the damage. I just got word that one of the Shopify sites I'm working with is switching platforms, they have 144k monthly visitors. My patience with Shopify is officially gone.

Greg-Bernhardt · ‎05-10-2023

An update is imminent, please hold tight.

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

kbarcant · ‎05-10-2023

While I appreciate the notice this one came too late to save the biggest store I've dealt with, I strung them along for multiple weeks with promised fixes from Shopify employees on the forums that never came.

We need a solution, not a situation update. What specifically is being done today to get our traffic back? Is Shopify going to give us each a Google Ad Credit to make up for the lost traffic? I have one site that's down about 30,000 clicks - at $0.60 (their average cpc) that's $18,000 in lost searches. I could calculate it at lost impressions if that's better for you.

George_Greenhil · ‎05-15-2023

Hey @Greg-Bernhardt

We were told we would get an update at the very start of last week which never came and then were advised imminent on Wednesday 10th, I would personally class imminent as within a day or two (down to my personal perception).

Can you please provide an actual date so we can plan around this?

shadi1 · ‎05-15-2023

Well its also getting worse my not indexed count jumped to 82k from 64k! and my indexed thou blocked by robot.txt has also jumped from 74 to 345. How are more wpm pages getting indexed ? Did they place a block in the robot.txt again?

Denny10 · ‎05-15-2023

We also recognized increasing numbers of indexed wpm pages. I guess adding a robots.txt block has been tried by the Shopify Team, but i can't find that block in robots.txt anymore. So it has probably been removed again. If I am wrong, please correct me. If it has been deleted, no more pages shall be indexed since the change. Anyway, you should take into account that the GSC is showing delayed data of usually a few days.

kbarcant · ‎05-15-2023

We're supposed to get an update today, everyone hang tight.

romko18 · ‎05-15-2023

I was told during the weeked by Shopify support that I have to reach out to Google, because those "web-pixel" and "wpm" URLs are created by Google and not by Shopify.
I think I'm getting old and stupid. I thought I knew a bit about SEO, but this tells me I know nothing. So sad 🙂

p1Commerce · ‎05-15-2023

Fortunately, for security purposes, Google is not able to make whatever pages they want on people's Shopify stores; shopify support should be aware of this issue by now you would have hoped 😞

Appreciate the assistance? Please hit the Like and Accepted Solution buttons.
--
An Exceptionally Technical eCommerce Firm
Entirely Focused on Search Position - p1commerce.com

kbarcant · ‎05-15-2023

Shopify created those URLs, NOT google. Their web pixel manager was a massive failure, they injected code that linked to those pages. It is solely Shopify's error, compounded multiple times with failed fixes.

shadi1 · ‎05-15-2023

No update yet, this is starting to feel like waiting for godot ........

George_Greenhil · ‎01-25-2023

Hey @J_19

Do you know if there is some kind of noindex tag we can add to our theme/stores which will mitigate further impact and indexing?

Shopify · ‎01-26-2023

Hi everyone,

This issue impacting the indexing results of Web Pixel Sandbox on Google has now been resolved on our end. As Google controls their own indexing, it may take some time to see the result.

If you continue to experience any issues, please try clearing your cache, or let us know by posting a new topic with as much detail as possible.

Thanks for your understanding and patience!

Shopify
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- Was your question answered? Mark it as an Accepted Solution

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MaloRGT · ‎01-26-2023

Thanks for the information!

J_19 · ‎01-26-2023

Shopify - it's pretty shitty that you marked this as "resolved". I DID NOT accept your solution.

More importantly, the way you "fixed" this issue is not truly a fix. You simply added "noindex, nofollow" to the pages but did not fix the root reason why Googlebot even is spending any time crawling these urls in the first place. Because of this, Googlebot will continue to waste our crawl budget on these urls - whether your noindex/nofollow directive "fix" is there or not. As I mentioned above, you need to remove the body, html, and head tags, 404/410 the old url format and use a new one.

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