Hello, I noticed this week that my URLs have changed. They now have a variant id at the end and none of my products are now indexed. I recently changed my theme from Dawn to Horizon. How do i change the URLs back or do i just resubmit my sitemap and wait for them all to be re-indexed?
Could you please share your store URL and password [if applicable] so that I can take a look and provide you with a solution code.
Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Thanks
could you help me with this too please? my store URL: 3de7b3.myshopify.com
Why do you need help with this?
Is something wrong?
And if yes, are you sure it’s caused the URLs?
Generally, even though your product may have no options, it still has at least one variant. It may be hidden in admin, but it's there.
When you arrive on a product page, most themes will pre-select first variant automatically. This is why you see its id in page address.
If product has more than one variant, the address changes to reflect the variant selected.
yes my google/youtube indexing is no longer accurate since the URLs include the variant when they shouldn’t. so i would like some help to reverse that.
Not entirely sure of your issue, but from my interpretation, since you’re talking about indexing I assume you’re talking about Google Search Console, not Google and Youtube app. if you’re talking about Google Merchant Center, well that’s a different subject entirely. But for this thread:
Shopify has a “canonical” of each product. The canonical URL for a shirt is: /products/shirt. Shopify then adds the specific variant id in the address bar, when you select the variant. This is completely normal. It’s supposed to be that way. But the actual canonical URL is just /products/shirt.
As for Google Search Console, there is a whole course to be learned there. Basically, variants are treated as duplicate content (with minor differences). Duplicate content is sometimes not indexed. That’s the nature of Google. They don’t want to spend vast resources indexing both red and blue shirts. They will index shirt. So, in order to tell Google “This blue shirt can be linked back to just shirt”, most shopify themes include what’s called a canonical tag. The canonical tag looks like:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/products/shirt">
And is written into every variant of the product. Google doesn’t want to waste time crawling thousands of nearly identical URLs. Imagine a store with 1,000 products and 10 variants each. That’s 10,000 extra URLs with minimal unique value. Google prioritizes unique pages and high-value content. Variant URLs usually don’t qualify. That’s why there are canonical tags. So if you have 1,000 products with 10 variants each, Google will usually index the 1,000 products, not 10,000 variants. Also, along the same line is Collection Aware URL, which is also not indexed.