A year of death on google results. 12 months of painstakingly trying. Any clues

This is by far a TLDR sorry. But if anyone is interested, I am at my wit’s end. Pointers would be extremely appreciated.

Apart from deleting the dozens of generic emails per day from sites offering ‘Hey we saw your site this is what needs fixing’ - i’ve done everything I can to find out from professionals what’s gone wrong. Albeit without hefty invoices.

My website was set up in 2017. It grew brilliantly. Turnover was great ( sufficient for me ) and I was reaching the first page for numerous search requests, results, and images. I invested heavily in divulging my passion which is magazine collecting. Completing my own collections and selling on my website. It is a very niche market and the items I sell can often be one of a kind worldwide, so a specific search for a certain item would, and should take you straight to me. Happy days.

At the peak of my website’s performance in 2021 my partner suffered a life-changing injury. I immediately became a carer and had to reign back the time spent packing orders. At the same time, my website became popular from magazine sellers themselves discovering me and copying my data and images to use on auction sites.

Struggling to combat this. I foolishly did two things. I closed my site for a couple of weeks to concentrate on some major life changes. I also added a third party app’ A “cozy theft lockdown” which hid all items from sale.

At around 20’000 products at the time. Unbeknown to me, this seemingly added a ‘no index’ tag to every product. Although undoing this app a few weeks later, I believe this tag still remained. It basically said to google “Don’t see me and don’t show me”

My Google impressions dropped dramatically from tens of thousands per month to eventually just 40. No one came. Apart from several people in London setting up their own websites who visit each day copying my text as soon as I write it up. I’ve even birthed a few new sites that look exactly like mine, which now rank highly, and visit on a daily basis. Yet, to the rest of the world, I am largely invisible. Frustrating.

I’m now the sole earner from what was a double-income household, so apart from the care work, I have worked tirelessly into the early hours each night, correcting everything possible. More fool me, I’m refusing to quit!

My website has around 40k products, all scanned and written up by me over a 7-year period, I don’t want to throw the towel in yet! But I need help.

Google says I am indexed. My impressions are growing well. Once people find me, the website functions good ( a couple of minor snags ) There are no problems with checkout etc.

My main problem lies in being searched. If you search for a specific magazine. Desirable magazines that arrive on ebay - ideally if you searched for that, you would fine me.

As an example. Something so specialist that only a few exist worldwide.

Vogue Italia Magazine - Lady Miss Kier -

Even if you add my website name to this magazinecanteen.

It still does not show., This is true of thousands of magazines. I do not show.

I confess I am new to these boards so I am unsure if they get many replies, if people find this stuff interesting.

Over the past 12 months, I have actively tried to make positive changes.

I have been adding my prudcust again one by one, to start each item fresh ( a worry is with delting so many old products per day, i worry that I could eb in danger of too many 404 results )

My new priducts i am paying correct attention to making every SEO unique, to the point and correct.

( my old products, were filled with the entire text of my product description. A no-no , although I was still found )

My categories also have correct seo ( i have hundreds ) and each one has an original synpisis, and relevant links to other categories, looping my site inside from one page to the next ( i was told this is a plus )

My images are being correctly tagged with the magazine’s relevant information as opposed to blank.

One thing which was suggested. That my inventory is TOO big. 40k individual products, and that I may simply have too much of what would be classed as Shopify’s Google allowance to even bother showing me. ( that shopify has a certain bandwidth allowance with google, and my site would bottle neck being let through, and as its impossible to show all I have, I am at the back of the queue, while its easier to grant bandwidth to multiple smaller sites? Something like that )

I make sure my theme is the correct updated version. However this seems to have a big which stops the second page of a search showing. They simply can not find out why )

As a test. I set up a smaller website for my faulty magazines. These items appear straight away in search results. Where as my original site does not. Example. Kate Moss The Face Magazine 1990 ( this appeared within a few weeks of adding to my secondary site (thefaceandid)

I have a few apps added. A heatmap, to allow me to view my visitors and their behavior. A block app ( for blocking countries that send me countless scam emails, and to block unwanted IP addresses )

It’s a business not a sports competition, most first businesses fail it’s post-mortem lessons are required for success in the next business that may or may not be in the same vertical.

Struggle or invest, trying to avoid invoices is the same cliché attitude most new struggling merchants have in avoiding cheap apps that would make them 10x money or same them substantial time.

Find a dedicated SEO specialist, probably preferably one that charges by results, or a business partner.

For copycats include scripts that will alter any link to point back to your site, and seek legal assistance for DMCA and IP protection. Ask other sites nicely ONCE, then gather concrete evidence find their sites service provider and DMCA them; search DMCA takedown services. For descriptions learn to use papertowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry , or specific verbiage and typos that fingerprint your content. Images steganography and watermarks.

And you are on ebay as well, yes…

Get a raw fresh theme to the original store reset it up and test it.

Purge seo apps.

Take an old version of the theme and a fresh install download them both and use a diff tool like Meld to see the differences.

Your looking for changes to the theme.liquid, it’s area or any related snippets.

Modifactions to any schema or opengraph code.

The robots.txt.liquid.

Check products if their metafield seo hidden feature is enabled.

https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/marketing/seo#step-2-hide-a-resource-from-search-engines-and-sitemaps

Check products description HTML for seo behaviors such as nofollows on internal links etc.

This is a seriously informative reply, Paul. Much more than I had anticipated. Thank you VERY much for taking the time to not only read but offer a lot of guidance.

It’s a lot for my untechy brain to understand so I am going to find someone who understands more of what you have suggested.

I am likely to make things worse if I tackle any of this.

I should answer a few of your questions…

It’s my first ‘online’ shop. I previously had a brick-and-mortar homewares shop for 10 years. I then did have an ebay shop for many years but closed that after setting up my website in 2017. It ran perfectly for 4 years.

I think I’ll take your advice regarding the plagiarism. And keep some evidence. I did reach out to their good nature as I had an app installed which showed 100s of visits with evidence fo dragging and copying. But by bit, their website became identical to mine. Category synopsis and all. But with a few word changes here and there probably enough to deter legal action.

Their email to me stated " sorry, but my website was tired and old and yours is amazing, so I had to do something"

After this, I called my weekend supplement section. " something for the weekend" - a A week later their site stated exactly this wording. I think I’ll accrue some data to this effect in case of legal pursuit. More importantly, fixing my own brand first.

I am realistic that if you offer a lot of content online, people will take it. This would be more bearable if the site was being found as much as it was by actual customers.

Again, so much amazing advice to start with. Sincerest thanks.

So far - I may have found a culprit.

I’ve spotted in the HTML of source for each product not showing on google the following code from LOCKSMITH

Even though this was a brand-new product generated only a few months ago from scratch, the code seems to have been applied.

I am uninstalling locksmith entirely, first removing the code from the theme following the uninstall procedures, and hope this is a decent start.

Locksmith closed categories with a certain key. Password, country etc, and I hadn’t used it much but seeing the code on html for magazines only recently added doesn’t seem great.

{"version":"v32","locked":false,"initialized":true,"scope":"product","access_granted":true,"access_denied":false,"requires_customer":false