Google Still Showing Old Prices for Sold-Out Products (Shopify & Merchant Center Issue)

Start a Business
1

I’ve been dealing with an issue where Google keeps showing old prices for sold-out products, even though they’re no longer available on the site. When a product sells out, it’s removed from the active listings, but Google is still displaying the last known price in search results.

Due to the nature of the product I don’t want this price to appear in search results after the product has been sold, though I do want the product to still appear.

I’ve already made several changes to try and fix this. In structured-data.liquid, I updated the structured data so that if a product is unavailable, it now shows “availability”: “OutOfStock” and doesn’t include price info.

I also updated social-meta-info.liquid to remove the tag so Google doesn’t pull the price for sold-out items.

In theme.liquid, I added a robots meta tag so unavailable products now get , which should stop them from being indexed.

I also went into Google Merchant Center and disabled automatic price updates to prevent it from pulling old prices from the website.

Even after making all these changes and waiting for Google to re-crawl, the old prices are still showing up in search results. I’ve checked Google’s Rich Results Test, and the structured data looks fine—no price listed for sold-out products. Google Search Console doesn’t show any structured data errors either. But when I inspect some of these sold-out products in Google’s index, the old price is still there.

Not sure if Merchant Center is somehow caching it, or if Google just hasn’t updated its index properly.

Is there anything else I should check or update to stop this from happening? How long does it usually take for Google to fully update and remove old prices? Would using Google’s URL removal tool help, or would that cause other issues?

Has anyone had this issue before and found a reliable fix?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

1 Like
2

It sounds to me you migh have multiple feeds connected, if you look at the link below, do you see more than one feed, such as automatic google feed?

https://merchants.google.com/mc/products/sources

3

It sounds like Google is caching the old prices, which can take time to update. Since you’ve already adjusted structured data and meta tags, try requesting a recrawl in Google Search Console > URL Inspection for affected products. Also, check if the old prices are being pulled from your Google Merchant Center product feed—if so, manually refresh the feed or force a re-fetch under Products > Diagnostics. The URL removal tool isn’t ideal because it could temporarily deindex the product. Instead, submitting a temporary fix in Merchant Center (e.g., setting the price to “0” for out-of-stock items) might speed up updates. If all else fails, contacting Google Support for a manual cache refresh could help

4

@Promer-Alena The question is regarding Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping, and Google does not cache prices, nor does it cache any data for that matter.

Do not set the price to zero, as that will cause pricing issues. Google Merchant Center does not allow prices to be submitted with the value zero.

The correct steps, are to check the data feeds that are being submitted. And also the supplemental feed, to ensure there is only 1 feed, and no supplemental feed modifying prices.

5

Hey! :blush:

So, if you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to disable automatic item updates in Google Merchant Center. This will stop Google from pulling outdated price info from your site.

Also, for products that are temporarily out of stock but might come back, you can add a tag to their pages. This way, search engines won’t index those pages until they’re restocked, which helps to avoid showing old prices in search results.

Hope I was able to help you! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

6

@masoomi-saxena The second statement is not correct with respect to Google Merchant Center.

Maybe the original poster needs to clarify the search results with a screenshot to demonstrate if it’s organic listings (text free) or shopping listings (paid / free)

Or even image results.

With so many different placements, I have seen many get confused what is what, because we have so much choice now.

7

Hi,

Thanks for jumping in with your insight, it’s really clarified things! You’re absolutely right that Google Merchant Center doesn’t cache prices, and I appreciate you correcting my initial assumption. Your focus on checking the data feeds and supplemental feeds makes total sense, and it’s helped me refine my comment. Also, good call on avoiding zero prices — I hadn’t considered GMC’s strict policy on that in this context. Your expertise has definitely made this discussion sharper, and I’m grateful for it! Curious to hear more from your experience.

1 Like
8

Oh, I see
Thanks for telling me, Emmanuel! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

9

Hi Did you manage to fix this issue and if so could you let me know how, as I google shows the prices of my sold items as well, and like you I still want them to show in the regular search but just hide the price.

many thanks

Jamie

10

The reason for price mismatch is usually due to structured data, have you tested the product landing page and check with: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

11

Hi thanks for you help, my out of stock products do not show a price on my shopify page, but they do in google search?, example below..

Search “flight of the navigator quad poster”

https://pastposters.com/products/flight-of-the-navigator-original-quad-poster-movie-poster-jf-sas-1

shopify-search-1.jpg
shopify-search-1.jpg1008×633 81.4 KB

How do i stop this using structured data as you suggested? I still want them to show in google search just not the price.

Many Thanks

Jamie

12

You need to edit the code, however expert errors, because submitting products with no prices will render invalid code, however if you must, but against my advice for example.

{% if variant.available %}

{%- product.price | money_without_currency | remove:‘,’ -%}

{% else %}{% endif %}

13

It sounds like you’ve already taken several good steps to fix the issue, but Google can sometimes take a while to update search results, even after re-crawling. Here are a few things you can check and try next:

Check Google Merchant Center Diagnostics
Go to Merchant Center > Products > Diagnostics and look for any errors or warnings related to pricing mismatches. If Google still detects a price, it might be pulling from an old product feed or cached data.

Force a Manual Fetch in Merchant Center
If you’re using a feed, manually refresh it under Products > Feeds > Fetch Now to ensure Google gets the latest data.

Use Google’s URL Inspection Tool
In Google Search Console, use the URL Inspection Tool on affected product pages and click Request Indexing to encourage a faster update.

Submit a Temporary URL Removal (If Urgent)
If the incorrect price is hurting your business, you can temporarily hide the URL using Google’s URL Removal Tool. This won’t delete the page, but it will remove it from search results until Google reprocesses it.

Check for Cached Versions in Google
Search for your product on Google and click the Cached link (next to the URL in search results) to see what Google is storing. If the old price is still there, Google hasn’t refreshed the page yet.

Try Structured Data Validation Again
Even if Rich Results Test looks fine, double-check with the Schema Markup Validator to confirm no hidden pricing data is still being detected.

Since Google can take days or even weeks to refresh its index, you might just need to wait longer. But if the issue persists despite all these steps, it could be worth reaching out to Google Merchant Center Support to see if they can manually refresh your data.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need more guidance.