This is all a bit new to me but I have been reading and trying to work out what is happening or should be happening.
My sitemap file is below and I am really looking for assurance that everything is working. The Google Search Console says it is ok and as far as I can see it is. The file was submitted to google 3 days ago. what puzzles me is that the console shows no pages or other information. Maybe this is normal behaviour and I simply need to allow more time for Google to crawl my site. I entered a few page URLs into a couple of different free crawler sites and they seemed to find the page ok but I don’t know if this is relevant.
I looked at the robots.txt file which looks like the ‘standard’ shopify file. I am using the Balance theme. Do I need to change something or just be a bit more patient?
I fully appreciate that it can take time and from what I have read that could be weeks. I have other non Shopify sites that have all indexed within hours in some cases which is why I want to establish if there is anything preventing Google from doing its thing with my shopify site when it is ready. In short I am just trying to be proactive rather than waiting for a failure and starting over again.
If there’s an issue, GSC will let you know. Other than that, sit back and work on other things like schema json ld, perfecting favicon, and making sure you have meta title and description in Online Store→ Preferences and brand info in Settings → General.
You’re on the right track, and from what you’ve described this all sounds normal, especially for a new or recently submitted site. Let me break it down clearly and reassure you point-by-point.
The sitemap URLs you shared are standard Shopify-generated sitemaps.
This is exactly how Shopify structures sitemaps for larger Stores.
The fact that Google Search Console says the sitemap is OK is the most important signal that mean google can access the files, they ate syntactically correct and they are eligible for crawling.
Another day and still nothing has happened!!!1 Don’t worry, only joking. I guess I will sit back and wait for GSC to do its thing. Thanks for your help.
I thought that an update might be useful. I managed to get Bing to index my site almost instantly. A few errors but nothing to worry about. It did tell me that my titles for 200+ products were too long. They may well be but Amazon use the same titles so I think I will focus on that at some other point.
Google on the other hand is still not indexing. It has indexed 9 pages and no more. I have become increasingly concerned that my setup is preventing Google from doing its thing. At the same time I have had 3 emails from 3rd parties suggesting that my site cant be indexed by Google. They may well be fishing or phishing. I have ignored them and will continue to do so.
@alibev yeah almost all of those that say those kinds of things are usually scammers, especially ones that point to robots.txt disallow nonsense. While it may be the case to some who have fiddled with it, the standard default Shopify files are not an issue.
It has been about 30 days since I submitted my sitemap to Google and so far it has only indeed 30 pages and seemingly random ones though I doubt it is random. At the rate that it is indexing the process should complete by early 2027. However, I don’t think I can afford to wait that long.
