@DaveSweetCures I think that @z285chen might be onto something. Could we do a 301 redirect from:www.yoursite.com/collections/vendors?q= just to the home page? or would that still leave it in the search console?
Hello @DaveSweetCures and @gregbernhardt , I need clarification on steps 4 and 5. It is my understanding that the Google Disavow Tool is for Spammy backlinks from OTHER sites pointing to your site as opposed to Spammy links ON YOUR SITE, which is the case here. In other words, you are disavowing a URL on your own site, not from an outside site. Could you please clarify how to use this tool for this specific issue? Thanks for your help!
I’m getting “Title” for my title on all my collections here. Am I putting it in the wrong place?
Correct Disavow tool is for external backlinks and I would not recommend using it unless you have a manual penalty from Google. The Temporary Removal tool is for internal links.
The solve is simply two steps.
- Remove in spammer incentive by ending the querystring printout on the page
- Noindex 0 result vendor and search pages.
@DaveSweetCures I’m not “technical” but was able to figure out that I needed to remove existing title code (after taking a backup!) and replacing with your title code. That clarification might help others that get stuck on it.
Hi @gregbernhardt quick clarification in regards to the post from @DaveSweetCures :
- When you say “ending the query string printout on the page,” it would be steps 1 and 2.
- When you say “Noindex 0 result vendor and search pages,” it would be step 3.
Correct?
Thanks again for your help.
I used the solution provided by @DaveSweetCures , but I’m getting this “translation missing” text attached to my 404 Not Found text. Does someone know how to erase the “translation missing” portion? I think it has something to do with the en.default.schema.json Locales.
Here is my main-collection-banner.liquid line above all script:
Here are my main-collection-banner.liquid lines with some tweaks above the schema:
Here are my theme.liquid lines to prevent the query from being printed in the title tag:
Here is the en.default.schema.json section that I might need to update:
Thanks for the help!
@gmeneses - @gregbernhardt Greg and others are correct in saying Google Disavow tool is a powerful tool that should be used with caution. However, this isn’t just an internal issue, the reason these links are being indexed by Google is because they are links on another site. Google crawls the SPAM site, follows the query link and because it looks like unique content indexes it.
Sign up to HREFs free webmasters account and you can dump a backlink profile for your site and you’ll see all the links for yourself. Image attached is a screenshot of our backlink profile, disavow will only bite you if you are foolish enough to disavow large chunks of links with no thought or care, but it’s clear with the Chinese characters which are the spam sites and I see no issue using disavow. BUT please, this is IMO.
I think it’s your h2 tag in the second image…
change
{{ ‘404 Not Found’ | t }}
to
404 Not Found
so it looks something like,
404 Not Found
We have 1.5million pages of spam created with this @eheurlin 3.5million, two sites responsible for 4 million pages of spam.
And I believe this could be solved by making the vendor query setup something you can opt in or our of using. Literally a Yes / No option in the shopify backend. If No, would simply serve a real 404 on any traffic on the vendor URL - where a site doesn’t need the vendor setup.
Instantly this would remove billions of pages of spam from Google.
Question is @gregbernhardt how do we get this implemented please? As current solutions provided by Shopify simply aren’t good enough IMO.
Thanks @DaveSweetCures . Your suggestion regarding the “translation missing” message worked.
@DaveSweetCures @gregbernhardt What happens if I disable the search bar feature on my store? I know that even when you type anything after the /vendors?q= URL, it will show as the page’s title, but deactivating the search bar might help with something. What do you think?
@DaveSweetCures I’m on the internal SEO team, so I can’t comment on anything regarding Shopify product. Please keep this thread updated as you implement your solutions.
I’m following this thread but a bit lost!
What should I do? I don;t want to risk doing anymore harm by trying to fix this and making things worse long term in Google.
Hello Dave,
Thank you for your precious sharing.
I just would like have some precision on the step 4 :
“4. You can easily remove thousands of pages from Google by using there remove tool an selecting the prefix option www.yoursite.com/collections/vendors?q=” => I made that yesterday and it seems it desindexed all collections page (I’m not sure, but this is that I’m seeing now).
So if it is the case, it is not the right url to send to “noindex” temporary all vendors url spam pages. Do you have the same behavior on your side ?
Best regards
Has anyone raised this issue this issue directly in the Google Search Central Help Community?
https://support.google.com/webmasters/community?hl=en
Generally, there’s lots of good support on various issues there and Google Experts will often chime in with solutions.
This is a far-reaching problem and all things being equal, Google doesn’t want all the SPAM pages in their index either.
Chiming in to say we have a client experiencing this as well.
To Shopify staff: this is a bug. When you request a path of /collections/something?q=foo, {{ collection.title }} should not be outputting “foo” because the collection object should be nil, assuming collection “Something” doesn’t exist. In fact, it should 404. But in the case of “Vendors” it loads as if the collection exists and passes the value of q into the title property.
Passing this off as “any site will do this” is simply not true. While yes, you can throw any parameter in a URL, the server has to actually accept the parameter and do something with it. In the case of “Vendors”, Shopify should be returning a 404 (not a 200) when no such collection exists. All the workarounds suggested in this thread are bandaids and don’t address the root problem.
I emailed Tobias (CEO) on this. A “Senior Lead” responded saying that they are taking it seriously and working to get it resolve, but could not give me a timeframe. They said it should be done ASAP.
Having same issue. Had 300+ pages indexed (as original content). Within a week, 3.5million pages were indexed and 3.7 million pages not indexed. In Total: 7.2 million pages … Not sure what to do, added “noindex” meta tag, it helped me to not get all 7.2 mill indexed, but how to remove indexed ones? Because when you using disavow tool and add link /collection/vendors it removes whole /collections/ from indexing, not only collections/vendors/ .
Hi Eagle,
It seems ok, you can use “suppression” tool in search consol, it will only remove the “collections/vendors/” pages. I tested, and for the moment, it is ok from my side.
Use the prefix option www.yoursite.com/collections/vendors?q=
To shopify team :
Do you think it is normal to take months to add a line of “404 not found” code that would solve this problem? I don’t think it’s normal on my side, it’s time to react.
It would also be interesting to advise your customers when we contact you by chat. I have contacted you 3 times about this, each time you told me that the problem was only from my side, and that no other shopify store had experienced this problem. It’s quite bold, when you see the number of topics dedicated to this problem…