“pages with noindex” are not problematic, if they are out of the index. The only thing that might need to be monitored is the crawl budget after everything is fixed.
The problem we had/have is “indexed, although blocked by robots.txt”.
The GSC is usually also lagging a few days behind. That’s why it might look like pages are still going to be indexed, which is not the case.
The only thing you can do to clear the index faster is to go to “indexed, although blocked by robots.txt” in Search Console and start a review. You’ll probably need several runs to get them all out of the index.
“web-pixel-manager URLs will 404 and drop from the index”
How? Is something changing in the future? Right now /web-pixels-manager pages are not blocked in the sitemap, not blocked with no-index tags, and not blocked with x-robots tags. What has changed and how can we verify that it’s actually changed?
I can’t tell google the problem is fixed and have them spend an exorbitant amount of our crawl budget over the next month to see that the pages are still indexable and being served by shopify. Stuff happens. Just be transparent with us and tell us what the roadmap is because saying indexable pages “will 404 and drop from the index” is a promise that seems unrealistic.
I think part of the problem is that shopify has created many url options of this sandbox pixel and now I have them scattered around in Google Page Indexing - I have versions in:
Blocked by Robots.txt
Crawled - currently not indexed
Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
Not found (404)
So can you confirm exactly what steps are needed to clean up this mess for each of these 4 categories?
Reading thru your comments, it seems the solution is to do nothing and let the shopify created url fix the issue. If so, you need to go back to all the versions of this sandbox url shopify created and make them not not indexable ie as the wpm@0.0.245@ variant
I’m astounded at the patience of this community. Clearly a lot of knowledgeable people in here who understand the impact of this issue. I don’t have anything to contribute except to add that I have the same issue and have regularly been frustrated with Shopify’s inability to address obvious issues in a timely manner (setting accurate times for shipping zones being one - still unresolved for the UK). It is clear that smaller retailers are all but ignored on this platform.
The problem is still not solved knowing that it is more than 2 weeks old for the number 1 host of ecommerce site it becomes shameful. Each day more is less credibility for all your users. Moreover, even today I still have the Wpm and Web pixel Manager pages that appear but I also have a Chinese URL that was not created by me, which has just been detected. So I’m going to ask users if this is related to the same problem as WPM and if they too have detected this because shopify doesn’t seem to want to help us this PROBLEM, or doesn’t communicate enough which makes everything unclear and very unpleasant.
The rest of the indexed pages are getting deindexed slowly however I have seen a new indexed page today. Please guide me if there is any index tag that needs to be added like vendors/collections.
I think part of the problem is that shopify has created many url options of this sandbox pixel and now I have them scattered around in Google Page Indexing - I have versions in:
Blocked by Robots.txt
Crawled - currently not indexed
Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
Not found (404)
So can you confirm exactly what steps are needed to clean up this mess for each of these 4 categories?
Reading thru your comments, it seems the solution is to do nothing and let the shopify created url fix the issue. If so, you need to go back to all the versions of this sandbox url shopify created and make them not not indexable ie as the wpm@0.0.245@ variant
I have the same problem. A lot of blank pages reported by google console related to web pixel sandbox manager. Google is anyway not indexing the pages because “excluded by no index tag”
