Why does the Shopify store not index on search engines?

Technical Q&A
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There’s one major issue with Shopify. Our store won’t index and Binge, for example (Google issues the same message), says:

Not indexed as this page is a redirect
URL cannot appear on Bing

There is no error links on the site, the domain redirects accurately, and there is no indication why the Shopify store generates this response.

I’ve heard others have major issues with their shopify store because search engines simply don’t pick up on them despite excellent SEO, etc. Without this working properly, you can’t even sell on Shopify.

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Hello @shopfy-2020

When Bing or Google sees your homepage as a redirect, they can’t index it—so you’ll never rank, no matter how good your SEO is. Shopify often redirects your naked domain ( yourstore.com ) to your www or vice-versa, and if that redirect isn’t a clean 301 to your primary domain, crawlers will skip it. Here’s what to do next:

1. Verify your primary domain setup

  • In Shopify Admin, go to Online Store → Domains.
  • Make sure your preferred domain (with or without “www”) is set as Primary. Shopify should automatically create a 301 redirect from the other version—confirm it shows “Connected” and “SSL pending or complete” without errors.

2. Check your redirect type

  • Use a tool like httpstatus.io or a simple curl -I https://yourstore.com command.
  • Ensure the non-primary version returns HTTP 301 to your primary domain (not 302 or a meta-refresh). If it’s not a 301, or if it redirects more than once, that confuses search engines.

3. Review robots.txt and canonicals

  • Visit https://yourstore.com/robots.txt and confirm you’re not accidentally blocking /.
  • View the source of your primary homepage and check the —it should point to your exact primary URL (including or excluding “www” to match your Shopify setting).

4. Submit the correct sitemap and request re-indexing

  • In Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your Shopify sitemap:

https://your-primary-domain.com/sitemap.xml

  • Then use the URL Inspection or URL Submit feature to request indexing of your root URL after the redirect fixes.

5. Test again after 24–48 hours

  • Run your homepage through Bing’s URL Checker and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test—both should return 200 OK for your primary domain, not “redirect.”
  • If they still see a redirect, double-check any custom apps or Liquid code in your theme that might be sending users (and bots) away from /.
  • Once your store’s root URL returns a clean 200 on the primary domain, search engines will finally index it—and you’ll start appearing for your branded terms and beyond.
3 Likes
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Also worth checking if you have a geo-location app which redirects visitors automatically.

hreflangs also help if you have multiple languages/markets.

Ad share a link to your store – this will give more information on why you’re having this.

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The page is being redirected because the content after the redirection is duplicate.
For example, A and B are two different URLs, but they display exactly the same content. This often happens when the same product is accessible through multiple different URLs.
Browsers follow the rule of indexing only one URL for identical content. This helps prevent duplicate content issues and improves the user experience.
So some URLs are destined not to be indexed.

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Not true. There are no duplicates. Nor will an entire store not be indexed on google over a few duplicate pages. That makes no sense.

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You can verify it this way.
Calculate the total number of pages on your website
Suppose there are 300 pages in total
But Google search console will tell you that 3k pages are not indexed.
This is actually just because the URL address is different, which will generate so many pages