Need to edit a Vendor Collection query URL

Technical Q&A
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Topic summary

Issue: SEO tool flags vendor query URLs like /collections/vendors?q=Vendor%20Name (spaces encoded as %20). The merchant wants to remove them or find the HTML generating them.

Key details:

  • These URLs are auto-generated by Shopify’s platform. The ?q= parameter performs a vendor search within collections; the default navigation/URL structure can’t be manually altered.
  • Shopify notes its built-in SEO is optimized and such URLs generally don’t harm rankings.

Follow-up concern:

  • Merchant sees queries like liquid%20force despite having vendor/tags set as Liquid-Force and expects no matches.

Latest explanation and cause:

  • Likely due to external spam backlinks. Third-party sites link to vendor query URLs to boost their own SEO. If the store’s base URL exists and a link points to that query, a page can be generated and indexed, even without a matching vendor.

Actions/next steps:

  • Implement redirects for the problematic vendor query URLs.
  • Review the linked community thread for solutions and best practices.

Status: No platform-level change; resolution depends on adding redirects and managing backlinks. Open/ongoing.

Summarized with AI on February 4. AI used: gpt-5.
3

Hi Shay, thanks for responding. I understand this is a vendor collection query, but there should be no matches for liquid%20force. I have the same issue with two other vendor collection queries. All tags, collections et al are set to Liquid-Force. If this is automatically created, shouldn’t also go away when there is no collection that matches?

Thanks ahead,

Mike