How to use Search Console to checkup on your Shopify store's indexing in Google

A customer Steve emailed me asking about how to tell if his Shopify store was getting indexed properly.

In order to see that it’s best to use Google’s Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools).

Search Console is a free service that collects search and SEO data about your website, but it can be confusing, contradictory, and sometimes wrong in places.

The best place to see how many urls in your store Google has seen is in the Google Index -> Index Status area.

This is a time series graph showing all of the urls Google’s indexed so far. I’ve attached an example from one of my sites, you can see that it’s growing over time.

The graph will change as you change your store and as Google finds new urls. Some day-to-day fluctuation is normal.

If this graph has a large spike down, that could be a problem.

It’s probably okay if you changed your theme, menus, or collections. Any of those could cause that spike because Google is having to recrawl everything that has changed.

But if you didn’t change anything on your store or if this graph is getting reset to 0, that’s a problem.

In those case you’d first want to contact Shopify support to see if anything is going on with the sitemaps. They are in charge of all of the sitemap.xml features which can have a major impact on your indexing progress.

Today would be a good day to Install JSON-LD for SEO if you haven’t yet.

You still have a couple of months before the holiday season. Just enough time to start getting Rich Snippets and beating your competition in the search results.