My site was hit with 12 random vendor urls using ?q=, there are hundreds of other stores hit with these spam links as well. Google stated to stop a page from being indexed it must not be disallowed in the robots.txt file.
But Iām not sure if I should be adding this below the tag:
{% if template contains āsearchā %}
{% endif %}
Or something like this?
{% if template contains ?q=ā %}
{% endif %}
The problem is this which is in all of the spam urls: ?q= but in another thread it was mentioned that the spammers are using search in which to spam hundreds of Shopify sites.
I have a similar problem ā¦ this kratom.org I just noticed on my website under /vendors?q=Kratom.org Maeng Da Kratom. I think it may have appeared on ~ Dec 16th 2022, but I have only just noticed it. I didnāt put it up on my website.
This is a epidemic for Shopify, as it seems to happening across thousands of your Customer Shopify sites, see below for search results:
I picked this up when I was looking at my Google Search Consule for my url. I think we need to be shown how to disable this /vendors?q= functionality as a matter of urgency.
As I said ā¦ I think thousands of your Shopify customer websites have been impacted, but they do not know it ā¦ yet!
Please advise what to do to stop this and disable it.
It isnāt really possible to stop them. I could go on your stores right now and type the name of my store in your search bar over and over again and youād see it in your search console. They havenāt made an app yet that would reach out of my screen and snatch away my keyboard before I did it
Itās annoying Iām sure, but what harm is it actually doing? You can filter this out of your search console if you donāt like seeing it. It has no impact on your store. My best suggestion is to focus more on selling your products and less inside of a search console chasing down a pest.
I disagree that it isnāt causing harm. These additional webpages are
getting indexed, which then impacts our website SEO. I only have 3 at
present, but another guy has 12 ā¦ it could grow to be hundreds ā¦
How can I disable the search bar? ā¦ what code / process do I need to
remove the search function?
Seriously, why bother responding if youāre not going to offer a solution?
In other similar posts THOUSANDS of these spam links caused someoneās website to be monitored by Google and their traffic affected. THATāS why Iām looking for ways to protect my store.
Just trying to set expectations Shopify can not do anything about this. They canāt stop people from typing random garbage, and they canāt stop how Google interprets it. Go to Googleās resources and bring the learnings there back.
Lychee88 - Yes your posts helped me to figure out what was going on, and
the penny then dropped. I had seen posts that keep dancing around this
problem - but not providing a solution - it seemed to be pushback on the
customers.
I am new to this forum ā¦ how do we get this issue escalated?
Unfortunately itās rare for Shopify to answer important issues so we rely on Shopify experts that can actually provide solutions. Unfortunately some just make comments just to comment without looking into the issue on other threads to see that this is an SEO issue that needs to be solved somehow.
Shopify should put a āDisallow: /collections/vendorsā in the robots.txt file since itās only affecting Shopify stores. These spammers found a vulnerability in Shopify and have taken full advantage.
All we can do is wait for someone who is knowledgeable that can point us in the right direction and bookmark the other threads in case they find a solution first.
Thank you for flagging this issue in the Community. We have raised the issue with our developers for further review. We do not have a timeline on the fix, however, I will provide an update once this has been resolved.
I would encourage you to view our top related threads on this issue that provide viable workarounds:
Our developers have recently shipped a change that will generate a 404 page if the vendor is unknown (based on query string). It will still print out the query string, but should block it from indexing on Google. These changes will only apply to vendor pages, but our teams will investigate whether other pages may be vulnerable to this abuse.
This change is rolling out platform wide as we speak, so it may take some time for you to see these changes implemented. However, moving forward, this should help mitigate the ability spammers have with taking advantage of the query print out to advertise their spam links.
The issue of these false web pages has stopped, thanks to the changes that were implemented. However, I still have a huge number of these ānot indexedā files remaining - how can I get them off my Google Search Console (refer attached)
