How can I remove .atom urls from my Google Search Console?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Multiple Shopify store owners report discovering hundreds to thousands of .atom URLs appearing in Google Search Console with “Crawled - currently not indexed” status. These URLs are automatically generated feed pages for product and collection pages (e.g., myshop.com/collections/bar/bartender.atom).

Technical Background:

  • .atom pages are XML feeds originally intended to help search engines detect fresh content updates
  • They display raw code when accessed directly
  • Google has begun crawling these pages, potentially impacting crawl budgets

Proposed Solutions:

Preventive measures:

  • Add Disallow: /*.atom to robots.txt file (code snippet provided)
  • Modify theme.liquid to remove atom feed links from page headers (code snippet provided)
  • Add noindex tags to the atom feed XML structure

For already-indexed pages:

  • Manual removal requests through Google Search Console (impractical for large volumes)
  • Wait for Google to deindex after robots.txt blocking

Current Status:

  • Discussion remains unresolved with no official Shopify response
  • Community members express frustration about needing developer-level solutions for platform-generated issues
  • One user notes these pages showing as “not indexed” is actually normal/best practice, suggesting the issue may not require intervention
Summarized with AI on October 27. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
2

Hello,

anybody here?

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