Hi,
i received this email from google that a page was blocked on google index.
when i checked the link, it shows my website but an additional page which i have not made, there are couple of these on my website on the google index website but i cant find the source of it, can anyone please help.
its all about crypto and other scams, i have attached a picture.
Hi, would you be able to provide a screenshot of the google search console where this page is showing please, or the email where this is flagged by google.
Please don’t include any personal information.
It is a bit weird.. I was originally just browsing this forum as we have a shop as well, but we are cyber security company so it did trigger my curiosity…
I would like to investigate this a little bit further.
Would you be able to go to your admin page, inventory, and within the filter tab(on the left) click filter by Product Vendors, and then click the “value” tab.
Is there any vendor name that you don’t. recognise?
there is only 1 brand which is ours
Okay, sorted,
The good news is, your site is safe and sound. This is more like a seo hack called “Spam Backlinks” and these have probably been generated by bots probably.
What happens is when you search for a nonexistent page on your site for example let’s search “burberry mens jacket” within the vendors areathe url link will end up looking like this, try these
out
https://www.platinumtailor.co.uk/collections/vendors?q=burbery+mans+jacket
or
https://www.platinumtailor.co.uk/collections/vendors?q=hello+there
or anything after the “=” in the url
These sites don’t exist, it’s basically an output of your search query like “burbery mans jacket” “sorry there are no products in this collection”
It’s a bit badly formatted by the theme as it looks like an existing page at first look.
So the issue here is, they put this search query through your website, including a domain name to their spammy site, and when they do this at the right moment, it gets indexed by google, and the spammers get a free backlink which increases the google page ranking as well.
Again, these are not on your site, just search terms indexed by google.
What can we do to prevent this?
First of all we can tell your site to tell google not to index that page, in you case this is already implemented as per the email you got from google,
“page indexed though blocked by robots”
That’s exactly what you want in your case, this link will not show up anywhere on google other than this notification from google.robots.txt is a little file on your site that tells the search engine what should be indexed on their platform and what shouldn’t be.In your case this is already set up correctly.
So you can just ignore the notification in your case.
Looking around a little bit, others are not so lucky. There are loads of pages out there where this link already indexed, it looks like they are targeting mostly shopify based shops, but this can happen with other sites as well.
For those who are looking for a solution on this, here is what to do:
Go to your theme>edit code and add this code to the in the header section in your theme.liquid file
just before the
{%- if request.path == '/collections/vendors' and collection.all_products_count == 0 -%}
{%- endif -%}
This will automatically tell the search engine not to index these pages.
For the pages already indexed:
Go to your google search console > indexing > removals and add the the bad link google indexed so far.
Hope this helps.
Many thanks to @thearchitect , really helpful. I tried contacting Shopify help and they were useless as usual.