Shopify - Web Pixels Manager Sandbox FAQ

[Trevor]

Summary of Events

Beginning in January of 2023, some merchants reported seeing a large amount of web pixel URLs being indexed in their Google Search Console. Our team reviewed the issue and searched for “web pixel manager sandbox” in Google. We confirmed that the URL of the iframe sandbox was being indexed and started working on a resolution. As a result, we partially mitigated the issue by 404-ing the old web-pixel-manager paths that were previously indexed, preventing the new path from being indexed.

Solution Moving Forward

We have created a solution to stop the crawlers from executing the JavaScript preventing pixel URLs from being crawled. This solution will help solve the issues our merchants are facing as outlined below:

• New pixel URLs should not show up in merchant’s GSC reports
• Merchant Google Search Console noindex reports should clear after a few months, (we are unable to offer a specific timeframe) as no new pixel URLs should be added.
• Merchant Google Search Console 404 reports will temporarily increase as the old pixel URLs that were noindexed will transition to 410s. After several months (we are unable to offer a specific timeframe), the 404 report should also start clearing.

Merchant SEO Concerns and FAQ

Do the 404’d and noindexed pixel URLs affect search engine crawling and crawl budget?

Google has confirmed to us that these 404 and noindex pages will not affect your crawl budget or Google’s crawl effectiveness of your store.

How long does it take for the old pixel URLs to drop from the Google index?

It depends on how many old pixel pages were indexed and the frequency of Google’s crawling of your store. For a site with many old indexed pixel pages with low frequency crawl rate, it could take months for these pages to drop from the index.

Is Shopify still linking to the old URLs that are now 404ing?

No, the old /web-pixels-manager/ URLs are no longer being used and are not linked anywhere from your site. These pages are now orphaned URLs that no longer exist anywhere.

Should you redirect all the 404s to other pages?

No, these old pixel pages no longer exist and were of no value to Google. These URLs should remain 404’d. See Google’s official documentation on 404s.

Do the old 404’d pixel URLs affect search engine rank and traffic performance?

No, the 404s will not hurt your SEO performance. The pixel pages are of no value to search engines and they are not linked in any way from your store website. See Google’s official documentation on 404s.

Do the current noindexed pixel URLs affect search engine rank and traffic performance?

No. See Google’s official documentation on noindex and comments from representatives here.

Should you add a robots.txt rule to block crawling of the pixel URLs?

No, blocking the URLs via a robots.txt disallow rule may prevent search engines from seeing the noindex header for the pixels pages, along with flooding your “content blocked via robots.txt” GSC report.

Is there a way to clear the 404 and noindex reports in GSC?

At the moment there is no way to clear these URLs from your reports. A workaround is choosing “Select all submitted pages” from the top left dropdown menu when viewing these GSC reports instead of “All known pages”. That will filter the reports to only use URLs in your sitemap.

Should you change domains as a method of clearing the GSC reports?

No, migrating your store to a new domain is strongly not recommended since it could cause great disruption in your store’s SEO performance.

Why has my Google SEO changed/faltered recently, in general?

With the understanding that the 404ing and noindexed URLs as confirmed by Google are not harming SEO performance, we would suggest reading up on the 6 major Google algorithm updates released since the pixel URLs were introduced. Following this link you can learn more about each update, how it may be affecting your store, and what you can do to improve SEO performance.

[kbarcant]

So my 50% drop in traffic two days before the Google update was because of the Google update???

[jasonwill21]

Hope it helps with bringing back our SEO traffic.

[AngryLuisatwpb]

Yes that help a lot, and it solved my problems, crawling problem was solved indeed, that’s never a problem. And this blog also helps my keywords ranking goes up. Thank you guys for what you done.

[Denis_B]

“We have created a solution to stop the crawlers from executing the JavaScript preventing pixel URLs from being crawled”

What is the solution?

[Denis_B]

So the action we should take is to do nothing and wait for all the pixel urls to disapear from the google reports?

I went ahead and temporarily removed in Google the pixel urls that were indexed by Google. Should I request cancelation or let them expire?

[DariusWS]

This fix will fix recommendation bug issue too?

[romko18]

@DariusWS - I’m also having this problem with product recommendation URLs, but this thread is not about that. I’m already working on a workaround for this.

[shadi1]

My indexed count thou blocked by robot.txt has increased by 300 all the sudden just few days ago? I thought the no index directive was suppose to prevent that. Is the no index still working in the header?

So now how long will it be before those indexed wpm are gone and aren’t they effecting my seo negatively.

Would using the removal too in GSC help?

[P1Commerce]

@Denis_B The solution works like this:

We personally recommend leaving the temporary removal to at least keep these pixel URLs out of the index while GSC stabilizes.

Details at: https://p1commerce.com/resources/shopify-web-pixels/

[znnadmin]

Hello @romko18 , I am having the same problem as you and @DariusWS ( Page indexing > Crawled - currently not indexed )

my-webiste.com/products/some-page?pr_prod_strat=collection_fallback&pr_rec_id=2f8bf9abf&pr_rec_pid=498839978014&pr_ref_pid=3593135425&pr_seq=uniform

Can you please share the thread so that we can share the fix if possible?

[ItsMeBirdie]

So its seems that I am having this issue as well, although as of today it does not seem to have been fixed yet is there something I need to do on my end?

[P1Commerce]

@romko18 @DariusWS

This change won’t impact the product recommendations.

WHY THESE ARE PRESENT

Shopify uses the pr_ query string variables appended to the urls for analytics to determine the success of the product recommendations in the “You may also like” section of the product pages. The tracking helps improve the recommendations over time, and I believe this is standard implementation on the Dawn theme.

IN GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Having these pages in Alternate page with proper canonical tag is good.

Having these pages in Crawled - currently not indexed is not ideal, but as long as your site has proper canonicals and these pages are indexed without the query variables, it isn’t really a concern.

Web pages will almost always have instances where they get indexed with and without query strings but as long as the canonicals are correct, should be fine.

REMOVING FROM TEMPLATE

If you wanted to remove them (keeping in mind dynamic recommendations would not improve) you can remove query strings by modifying your card-product.liquid file.

FIND INSTANCES OF:

{{ card_product.url }}

AND CHANGE TO:

{{ card_product.url | split: "?" | first }}

This will remove all query strings on product urls passed to the product grid display.

[SheenaSchleichr]

First off, it’s unlikely that these web-pixel-manager or [email removed] URLs caused a decline in organic traffic/rankings. It was unfortunately timing that this happened around the time several G algo adjustments rolled out, but we manage a number of Shopify+ sites that were affected by this bug and none experienced a performance drop.

We were able to have all of the WPM URLs (both versions) de-indexed within a few days of seeing the jump in indexed pages by using Removal tool within Google Search Console. There’s no reason to be scared of this tool–just use with care.

You can do a site operator lookup to see which version of the WPM URLs your site has indexed by plugging this into Google: site:yourdomain.com/web-pixel-manager

Obviously replace “yourdomain” with your actual site’s domain name. Hit enter & see what comes up. Then do the same with [email removed]

As an example, here’s the lookup with a wildcard (*) for the domain: 535k results!

Whichever version you see indexed for your domain is what should be input to the Removal tool. If it’s both versions, then submit two separate removal requests with “Remove all URLs with this prefix” selected:

This will cleanup WPM URLs in the index and GSC temporarily. Once the Removal expires, the pages won’t reindex because of the noindex solution the Shopify implemented. Easy peasy.

[Mont]

So over my head. I just moved my little growing store to Shopify thinking it should be fairly understandable and manageable. Shouldn’t be rocket science. That was the pitch after all. Guess I need a dev team now to figure this out.

[jasonwill21]

@SheenaSchleichr

In my opinion, there exists a noticeable discrepancy between larger, high-authority Shopify PLUS stores and smaller merchants such as ourselves. We are undoubtedly facing significant challenges. It seems that Google consistently penalizes small merchants and new stores like ours without providing any explicit justification. As we are aware, comprehending and adapting to Google’s algorithmic changes can be quite intricate, as it operates on a highly sophisticated level. Unless one has personally encountered such penalties, it is difficult to truly grasp the implications. Additionally, I have observed that a store that features an extensive array of “links” pertaining to factors like apparel sizing and colors may experience the greatest impact. Perhaps, in the future, if Google were to penalize larger stores while leaving smaller merchants unaffected, it would offer a different perspective, warranting further observation and let’s see. have a Beautiful Day!

[Mont]

Prepare folks. Small business entrepreneurs that is… You may be reduced to referrals and direct email. Google may or may not be helpful to us. Time will tell but prepare for not.

IMO next decade will not be friendly to small biz.

[EnterGallery]

You mentioned:

• New pixel URLs should not show up in merchant’s GSC reports

and this was posted on 15th May

I have new web pixel URLs still coming in on GSC, the latest is 19th May?

When is this actually likely to stop?

[Mont]

Increase in 404 pages. Google asks to validate fix. ???

[EnterGallery]

For our site, this really doesn’t seem to have stopped, in fact it is getting worse.

I recently posted that we had several of these URL’s added between 15th and 19th May. Since then Google has identified over 500 more of these in our 404’s.

It is now becoming very difficult managing our normal 404’s because we are having difficulty finding them.

Please, how can we make this stop?

In desperation I am trying the Remove Tool, to block anything with [email removed] and [email removed] for six months, in the hope this will help.