A Shopify store owner is experiencing issues with Google indexing collection pages that exceed the actual product count, resulting in “No products found” errors. For example, Google indexed page 18 of a collection (https://spoiledbrat.co.uk/collections/chloe-meadows?page=18), but the collection only has 152 products with 12 items per page—not enough to populate 18 pages.
Likely Cause:
The collection previously had more products, and Google indexed higher page numbers that are now empty. No 404 error is returned, so Google doesn’t automatically drop these URLs from its index.
Proposed Solutions:
Manual removal: Use Google Search Console to manually remove the problematic URLs
Robots.txt configuration: Add rules to prevent indexing of query parameters like ?page= to avoid future indexing of pagination URLs
Redirect approach: Implement code to redirect empty pagination pages to the first page of the collection, though SEO implications are unclear
Meta refresh tag: Use a meta refresh redirect when no products are found (code snippet provided)
Status: The discussion remains open with multiple technical approaches suggested but no confirmed resolution. Participants recommend verifying any robots.txt changes in Search Console before implementation to avoid affecting high-traffic URLs.
Summarized with AI on October 24.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
Looks like your link is page 18 of the collection. If you go to the actual collection url, the products are there. My guess is it’s got something to do with the pagination and/or canonical tag. You have infinite scroll, right? Try load more or something. You can manually remove any page from indexing or fix the issue and wait for Google to re-index.
It is a legitimate URL, and Shopify is trying to render this page, but your collection simply does not have enough products.
12 per/page should be at least 205 for 18th page, but only have 152…
It may have had more products before and this URL got into index, so Google would not drop it because no 404 returned…
Manually removing the URL in Search console is probably the simpler option.
Possibly, can add code to redirect to some other page, not sure if this is a better option from the SEO point of view?
In my experience, I always recommend omitting the indexing of these query params in collection routes to avoid indexing incorrect content.
In short: use robots configuration to tell Google not to index query params like page and filter, since they cause errors and can lead to the same URL being indexed multiple times. It’s better to add a rule in robots.txt to fix this.
Have you already evaluated creating a robots.txt rule to solve this?
If you haven’t evaluated it, it’s important to be clear before doing this that you aren’t affecting high-traffic indexed URLs that use query params.
To verify it’s correct, do it from Search Console.
Additional:
In the theme you can generate a configuration with Liquid so that if the collection has no products, it adds a heading.
This code is to redirect the visitors to the url in content immediately.
It’s more of a general example.
Actually, as I mentioned, you may redirect to, say, the first page of the collection from these “empty pages”, but again, need someone SEO-proficient to tell whether it’s a good thing.
