Update: Shopify support passed it onto their “support team” and then finally got back to me. They claimed this was an “intentional feature” and that nothing was wrong and then sent me a copy / pasted help article of a totally unrelated issue that has nothing to do with this problem. And then told me they would pass it on to the DEVs to look at, as if acknowledging that their response made no sense and that this clearly was not intended functionality. However, at the same time hilariously enough they took our advice and added a tag to those pages, the issue seems to be gone entirely on my end. Are any of you still having this issue?
Topic summary
Multiple Shopify store owners reported a significant issue where Google Search Console showed thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages with /services/login_with_shop/ URLs being indexed, despite being blocked by robots.txt. These URLs are associated with Shopify Shop App login flows and discount capture mechanisms.
Initial Assessment:
- One expert initially reassured that robots.txt blocking should prevent indexing
- However, multiple users confirmed these pages were actually appearing in GSC’s “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt” section
- The volume ranged from 55,000 to 500,000+ URLs per site over just a few months
Key Concerns:
- URLs cluttering Google Search Console reports
- Potential waste of crawl budget on non-valuable pages
- Shopify support initially blamed Google and provided unhelpful responses
Resolution:
- After escalation to Shopify’s development team, the issue was resolved
- Shopify added
<noindex>tags to these pages - Affected users confirmed the problem was fixed, with URLs moving to the “Noindex” section in GSC
- Timeline: approximately one week after proper escalation to developers