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.
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.
Steps to hide products from sitemap:
- Export Products you wish to hide using Matrixify.
- Edit the exported file:
- Add Metafield column “Metafield: seo.hidden [number_integer]”.
- Fill the column with value “1” in all rows.
- 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.
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.
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]”.
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.
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.
If all details seem to be correct then press the “Import” button to start your import.
Once the import is finished your data will be updated and Products should be no longer visible in Google and other search engines.
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.
Give search engines up to 2 weeks to stop showing those links from search results.
Good to know
- Learn more about the app in Matrixify “How It Works” page.
- Development store sitemaps might not be complete and not include the Products sitemap.
- If you wish to bulk manage and edit other Metafields, see Matrixify tutorial on how to bulk manage Metafields.
- Check our other Matrixify Product related tutorials.
- Each column from our Products template is explained in Matrixify Products sheet documentation.
- Have any questions or issues? Feel free to reach out to us directly by any means listed in Matrixify “Contact Us” page.
