Hey all, I was hoping someone would help me out. I have never had this problem before, but I just received an email from Google about the following errors and pages not being indexed.
i don’t know what triggered this and how to solve it. i have included a screengrab of the information. Any help going in the right direction would be great. Thank you
Hi @fashionfables ,
I understand you encountered indexing errors on your Google Search Console.
Not found(404)
According to Google, if some URLs on your site are throwing 404 errors, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results. 404 errors are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this.
However, if you’d like, you can create 301 redirects from your 404 error pages to your correct pages. The 301 redirects let Google know that the old pages are no longer relevant and up-to-date information can be found on your new page.
Alternatively, you can leave the 404 errors instead of creating the 301 redirects. Even if you don’t create a redirect for that 404 URL, Google will eventually find out that the URL isn’t available on your website and will stop showing a 404 error for it. If you want to learn more about 404 errors, please refer to this post: Website maintenance: Check and fix 404 error pages.
Blocked by robots.txt
Checked your robots.txt file if there is any directive that’s blocking the page or website URLs.
Alternate page with proper canonical tag
This means that two versions of a page on your website have the same canonical URL. Google will exclude the duplicate version and index the main version of the page. You can read this article: How To Fix “Alternate page with the proper canonical tag.
The key step is to check these highlighted pages and confirm that the canonical URL is correct and you intend to index the canonical URL and not the alternate URL reported.
Crawled - currently not indexed
This notification suggests that there isn’t any problem on your site, but that Google was just taking some time to fully crawl and index your site, which is perfectly normal. If you’re running a small website with quality content, this status will automatically resolve. If you notice any other page that Google does not yet crawl, you can force Google to crawl a page using the “Request Indexing” feature.
Also, it can take up to weeks for Google to index your changes, depending on how often your website is crawled and the crawl budget set by Google Search Console. You can read more at the Google’s documentation: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203?hl=en.
Discovered - currently not indexed
As the URLs in the Google Search Console indexing report are under “Discovered – currently not indexed”, this warning means that the page/s was found by Google, but not crawled yet. These URL state will automatically resolve after Google crawls the URLs. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL, but this was expected to overload the site; therefore, Google rescheduled the crawl.
If you wish, you can resubmit your sitemap to Google Search Console to re-crawl your Shopify store.
I’m excited to let you know that the** Yoast SEO App** is now available on Shopify! This app can help you optimize your store’s SEO, improve its visibility and Rich Resuls. You can take advantage of a 14-day free trial to explore its features and see how it works for your store.
I hope this helps. Good luck on optimizing your site.
I’d like to inform you that Pages that are not indexed by Google in the list below are not errors, they are unnecessary pages, duplicate pages, 404 pages, account page, checkout page, cart page,… These pages aren’t neccessary to show up on Google Search Results so Google will not index them by default
However, here are some resources that we can find about those issues.
- “Alternate Page with Proper Canonical Tag” This status message means that there are two versions of a page on your website having the same canonical URL. Google will simply exclude the duplicate version and index the main version of the page. This ideally means Google recognizes these canonicalized URLs correctly, and there is nothing you need to do on your part. You can read more here.
- “Page with redirect” This means that some of your pages aren’t indexed because users and crawlers entering them are redirected to other URLs. Google will index the target URL instead. In most cases, having redirected pages is normal and poses no danger to the visibility of your website. You can read more here.
- “Blocked by robots.txt” - "Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag This means that your website’s robots. txt file is blocking Googlebot from crawling the page. Some of the URLs in Shopify are intentionally blocked by the robot.txt to protect your SEO. The cart page is an example. Shopify actually has some more information on the Robots.txt here.
- Not found (404): This means the content of those URLs doesn’t exist. It may happen if you remove a product, collection or page from your website. If that’s the case, there’s no need to worry about it. You can read more about it here.
I hope it can help. Thank you!
Best,
Daisy - Avada Support Team.
