Robots.txt file preventing privacy policy and terms of use from being indexed

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Google cannot index the site’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use pages because current robots.txt rules are blocking them. The poster asks how to modify robots.txt to allow these pages to be indexed.

Context: These are standard Shopify template pages. The poster also questions whether Google needs to index such pages for shop compliance.

Key terms: robots.txt is a file that tells search engines which parts of a site they are allowed to crawl, which can affect indexing visibility.

Requests/Action items:

  • Guidance on updating robots.txt to permit indexing of the policy and terms pages.
  • Clarification on whether indexing of these specific pages is required for compliance.

Outcome/Status: No solution or consensus provided yet; discussion remains open with unanswered questions about both the fix and compliance necessity.

Summarized with AI on February 7. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hi,

I’ve learned that Google is unable to index some of our pages due to the robots.txt file. How do fix robots.txt file preventing privacy policy and terms of use from being indexed?

These are the template shopify pages, but doesn’t google need to index these pages to ensure shop compliance?

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks