How To Noindex a Shopify Page With Metafields

Kyle Risley is a senior lead of SEO at Shopify and has worked on search engine optimization for the past 12 years.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about making sure your site appears in search engine results so shoppers can find your products. But what if you don’t want search engines like Google to find a particular page?

For example, you might create multiple versions of a landing page for A/B testing, but you don’t want search engines to index multiple versions of a page. That’s where deindexing comes in. One of the easiest ways to deindex a page is with a noindex meta tag.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to noindex a Shopify page without using any code.

What is a noindex tag?

A noindex tag is a message that tells search engines not to index a URL. Search engine bots crawl and index the internet to discover and understand new webpages. Every time you add a new page to your site, a program called a site crawler adds the page to its index for your site.

Indexing does two main things: It allows pages to appear in search engine results, and it helps the search engine’s algorithms assess your website’s pages. The noindex tag hides pages from search engine results and removes the noindexed page from the search engine’s consideration of your domain.

When to noindex a page on your online store

• Simple landing pages
• Duplicate content
• Outdated blog posts

There are a few reasons you may want to noindex a page:

Simple landing pages

The most common use case for noindexing a page is duplicate or low-quality landing pages. For example, you may create a no-frills landing page for paid search or email traffic. If your landing page is essentially one giant call-to-action button, you might not want search engines to index it.

Having just a few of these lower-quality pages isn’t a big deal to search engines, but if you have a bunch, you may want to look into noindexing them so that search engines don’t flag your site as low-quality.

Duplicate content

Creating different versions of the same page (such as for A/B testing) can make it harder for the primary page to rank in search engine results. A noindex tag on the “extra” page versions can streamline the search engine’s decision-making process—instead of choosing between multiple versions, it will always select the primary page.

Outdated blog posts

If you don’t want a blog post to be found in search because it’s out of date, but you don’t want to delete the page, a noindex tag could be a good solution.

Say you wrote a blog post a few years ago about your tea company’s sourcing trip to Japan. A lot has changed since then—you’re working with new suppliers and selling different varieties of tea—so you don’t want potential customers finding the post via search, as it might confuse them about your offering. But in a newer blog post covering your latest sourcing trip, you want to link out to the old post.

How to noindex on Shopify

1. Decide which pages you want to hide from search engines
2. Create seo.hidden metafield
3. Apply the noindex
4. Wait for search engines to crawl your site

Here’s how to noindex a page on your Shopify Store without having to edit code:

1. Decide which pages you want to hide from search engines

Most of the time, you don’t need to noindex pages. For example, you don’t need to noindex every page that isn’t up to your quality standards. A good indicator that you may want to noindex a page is if you see on Google Search Console that a decent amount of search traffic is going to a page you don’t want people to see.

Once you’ve decided which page or pages you want to noindex, note the page type or types, such as:

• Products

• Collections

• Pages

• Blogs (entire blogs)

• Blog posts (individual posts)

2. Create seo.hidden metafield

In Shopify, you can use the seo.hidden metafield to apply a noindex,nofollow meta tag to the page, remove the page from the site’s XML sitemap file, and hide the page from internal site search. Here’s how to create the metafield:

Within your Shopify Admin, navigate to Shop Settings > Custom Data within Shop Settings in Admin (or type “metafields” into the search bar). Select the page type you’d like to noindex, such as Products.

Select the Add Definition button.

Fill in the fields:

• Give it a clear, comprehensible name (like NoIndex).

• The Namespace and key must be seo.hidden.

• For the description, add the instructions “Enter ‘1’ to noindex this page.”

• The Type must be Integer.

When done, click Save.

Repeat this process for any other page types you may need to noindex.

3. Apply the noindex

To apply the noindex metafield, navigate to the page editor for the specific page you want to noindex. For example, if you want to noindex a product page, navigate to Products and then select the product page you want to hide from search engines. Scroll down to Product metafields.

You should see the new metafield you just created. In the space next to your metafield’s name (this one is named NoIndex), type “1” and click Save.

You can check if your noindex tag worked by navigating to the page URL. Right-click (on a PC) or control-click (on a Mac) and select Inspect. Use the “find” shortcut to search for “noindex.” If it appears in the source code, that means you correctly noindexed the page, even if it still appears in search results for a few days (or weeks).

4. Wait for search engines to crawl

Once you’ve added the noindex tag to a page, it can take a few days to a few weeks for search engine crawlers to re-crawl the page and remove it from search results. If the page is more popular, it will be crawled sooner. If it’s less popular, page indexing may take longer.

You can speed up this process by submitting the URL for reindexing in Google Search Console, but this usually isn’t necessary—if it’s taking a long time to reindex your page, it’s likely not receiving much traffic and shouldn’t be a source for concern.