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How to hide Shopify Products from Google, sitemap and other search engine results – in bulk

How to hide Shopify Products from Google, sitemap and other search engine results - in bulk

You can hide Shopify Product from search engines and sitemaps in bulk by using Matrixify ability to bulk manage Metafields.
Shopify does allow to add specific Metafield that will do exactly that.

See what Products are in your store’s sitemap indexed by search engines

The sitemap file is located at the root directory of your Shopify store’s primary domain name. For example: johns-apparel.com/sitemap.xml.

Open your sitemap to your store and locate products sitemap.

1 - see your Shopify stores Product sitemap

Copy the link to the products sitemap and open in your browser to see all products that are in your sitemap and indexed by search engines, such as Google.

2 - see your Shopify stores Product sitemap

Steps to hide products from sitemap:

  1. Export Products you wish to hide using Matrixify.
  2. Edit the exported file:
    1. Add Metafield column “Metafield: seo.hidden [number_integer]”.
    2. Fill the column with value “1” in all rows.
  3. Import the file to hide your products from sitemap and search engines in bulk.

Let us dig into how exactly to hide products from Google, sitemap, and other search engines.

1. Export Products you wish to hide using Matrixify

To export your Products first go into the Matrixify app and create new export.

In the “New Export” page select to export “Products”.
Open Basic Columns group and select to export only “ID” and “Handle” columns.
The app does not need other fields to update any product level Metafields.

Export Product ID and Handle from Shopify bulk Matrixify CSV Excel XLSX

Here you can also click on the “Filters” button and apply filters to only export specific Products.
Read more about export filters.

Click the “Export” button at the top or bottom of the page to start the export.

2. Edit the exported file

Once the export is finished you can press on the “Download Exported File” button to download a file with your exported Shopify Products data.

Open the file and you should see rows of each exported product ID and Handle.

2 - export products to bulk hide from google sitemap search engines excelify

1. Add Metafield column “Metafield: seo.hidden [number_integer]” to the exported file

In this file, you will need to manually add the column “Metafield: seo.hidden [number_integer]”.

3 - export products to bulk hide from google sitemap search engines excelify

2. Fill the column with value “1” in all rows

This would be the Metafield that Shopify needs to hide products from Google and other search engines – because it removes those products from the sitemap.

Now, in this new column you can fill with value “1” in all rows that you want to hide.

4 - export products to bulk hide from google sitemap search engines excelify

3. Import the file to hide your products from sitemap and search engines in bulk

Once the file edits are done – save the file.

Head back into the Matrixify app and upload your file to the Matrixify “Import” section.

A new import page will open and Matrixify will start to analyze the file.
Inspect the import job, make sure that the app recognizes the import as “Products” and that product count in the file looks correct.

Import to bulk hide products from google search engines

If all details seem to be correct then press the “Import” button to start your import.

Bulk hide Products from Google sitemap engines Import in progress

Once the import is finished your data will be updated and Products should be no longer visible in Google and other search engines.

Bulk Hide Products from google sitemap engines import completed

Check that the products are hidden

As this Metafield now is updated in your Shopify stores sitemap you can now check your store’s products sitemap to see what products are indexed by search engines.

If the product is not visible in your sitemap anymore, then search engines will not see it too.

3 - see your Shopify stores Product sitemap

Give search engines up to 2 weeks to stop showing those links from search results.

Good to know