How can I improve the organization of my collection items?

Topic summary

A Shopify store owner is concerned about how their collection pages appear in Google search results, specifically the sitelinks (links displayed below the main search result) looking disorganized.

Recommended Solutions:

  • Block default collections from indexing: Add /collections/frontpage and /collections/all to the robots.txt file to prevent these pages from appearing in search results. Alternatively, use Disallow: /collections/* to exclude all collection pages.

  • Create a custom /all/ collection: Since Shopify’s default “all” collection cannot be edited in the admin panel, create a custom collection that includes all products. This allows full control over the SEO title (e.g., “All products by Diligent Self”).

  • Improve page titles: Edit the “Search engine listing” titles for individual collection pages. If Google continues auto-generating titles, update the theme’s <h1> tag on collection pages.

  • Wait for re-indexing: After making changes, request Google to re-index the site and allow a few days to see results.

The discussion remains open with one participant acknowledging the advice as helpful.

Summarized with AI on November 13. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.

Hello! We are having issues with our collection items seeming unorganized. Are there any recommendations on how to modify our collections to make it simpler? It doesn’t look great when you search out store in google because of the collections:

Hello,

These sitelinks (the links below a primary search result) are automatically chosen by Google. You can tell Google which specific pages to use but there’s a few things you could do to try and clean it up:

Stopping the pages from being indexed

If you tell Google to not index https://www.diligent-self.com/collections/frontpage and https://www.diligent-self.com/collections/all, those pages will stop showing in the sitelinks (like all changes with Google it might take a few days to see the results). You do this by editing your robots.txt file and adding those two URLs:

Disallow: /collections/frontpage

Disallow: /collections/all

You could also exclude all collection pages with:

Disallow: /collections/*

Improving the titles of the pages

Google’s showing the titles for the pages like “Collection: - All” which, as you said, is a little messy. You can improve the titles of the collections by editing the “Search engine listing” titles on an individual collection page. If this doesn’t work it’s possible Google’s still trying to automatically generate a good title for the page. In this case you might need to update your theme and simplify the

tag on the collection pages to display the exact text you want.

Creating a custom /all/ collection

By default Shopify stores have an ‘all’ collection that includes all products in the store. The problem is that this collection doesn’t show up in the admin so you can’t customize the “Search engine listing” title. If you haven’t already, I’d create a custom ‘all’ collection so you can control the SEO title of the products at https://www.diligent-self.com/collections/all

Putting everything together

Looking through your site I think you’d be ok with having https://www.diligent-self.com/collections/all show up as a sitelink, if it looked better, but would rather https://www.diligent-self.com/collections/frontpage didn’t show up. I’d recommend combining the steps above to do the following:

  • Add /collections/frontpage to the robots.txt file so it isn’t indexed by Google
  • Create a custom /all/ collection and edit it’s SEO title to something ‘prettier’ like ‘All products by Diligent Self’

Then ask Google to reindex your site, wait a few days, and see if it looks better.

Happy to answer any followup questions you might have and if this was helpful I’d appreciate it if you could accept this answer as the solution.

Thanks!

Daniel

1 Like

Thats really good advice. I fully agree.