Hi Mirko We have been facing the same issues but cannot seem to get a solution. I have been advised by a New Agency to rebuild a New Shopify Store. and migrating over, is this a suggestion worth doing. Or do you have any Notes on how I could Fix the issues on my Shopify Store. Or Who I could get assistance from. I am in South Africa and havent as yet found help fixing. Regards Caron
Topic summary
A Shopify store owner discovered nearly 80,000 unwanted URLs with tracking parameters (e.g., ?pr_prod_strat=collection_fallback&pr_seq=uniform) appearing in Google Search Console, potentially harming SEO rankings by consuming crawl budget without being indexed.
Root Cause:
These URLs originate from Shopify’s native product recommendation system, which appends tracking parameters to collect visitor behavior data for improved suggestions.
Proposed Solutions Discussed:
- Modifying theme code (e.g.,
card-product.liquid) to strip parameters from crawler-visible links while preserving them for user clicks via JavaScript - Adding
Disallowrules to robots.txt targeting these parameter patterns - Using
noindex, nofollowmeta tags (deemed ineffective since parameters don’t appear inhandleorcanonical_urlvariables)
Community Feedback:
Multiple users report that standard fixes (robots.txt blocks, code modifications) fail to prevent Google from crawling these URLs. One user claims to have successfully de-indexed 200K+ pages but hasn’t shared the specific method publicly.
Current Status:
No definitive solution confirmed. The issue appears to be a persistent Shopify platform limitation affecting multiple stores. Rebuilding stores won’t resolve it since the tracking mechanism is built into Shopify’s core system. Some users note Google primarily penalizes crawl budget issues on sites with 1M+ pages, suggesting smaller stores may experience limited impact.