🔎 Focus: Technical SEO
🔴 Impact: High
🔴 Difficulty: High/Risky
Dear Tech SEO 👋
Let’s talk today about how easy is to mess up your website with a couple of clicks. In this case is a Shopify store…
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Disaster in 2 clicks…
Shopify makes deploying new markets simple. With a single toggle, you can activate a new language or region folder.
It is also simple to break your indexation.
In Shopify you can easily add a new language, too easily
A client accidentally activated a duplicate language market on an enterprise store. Within 48 hours, an entire subfolder containing identical content went live, got crawled, and was indexed by Google.
The brand's domain authority worked against us.
Google assumed the fresh subfolder pages were legitimate updates, and within days, that single accidental subfolder hijacked 20% of the site's total organic traffic.
The first thing I thought:
I will fix this mess with a index removal request on Google Search Console! 💡
And that is the experiment about, is that the best way to go?
Ready? Let’s goooooooo
Having A Great Brand Is Not Always Great…
We are talking about this brand being top 3 in their niche. It happened that Google turns out to “blindly“ trust the content on this website: great crawl rates & speed of updates.
That was the whole problem for our little language folder mistake: I am not sure if it is freshness bias but it picked up the 1000s of new pages quite rapidly:
Detail of how Google advises to build a
GraphRAG centered AI Agent System
In other instances, I would be proud of sharing this chart. From 0 to 1000 clicks in matter of 48 hrs. Dang!
In this case, I was quite cold-sweating thinking what to do. Terrified.
From Bad to Worse
The content on the original website was in English. When deployed the new language , English, the new folder (en-gb) was without any real difference from the original.
In short, with 2 clicks the website had duplicated pages for every single landing.
You understand my cold-sweating by now.
Here is the worse part:
GOOGLE PREFERRED TO RANK THE NEW PAGES IN THE SUBFOLDER INSTEAD OF THE ORIGINALS
Sorry, I’ll behave myself.
Google picked the new URLs over the originals for the index.
Users were going to the subfolder (alternative language) pages instead the original pages.
New pages were in English as the originals
Href lang attributes were not set
Fresh pages, were preferred
💡 Google could not understand that the new folder was a different language. I believe because of a mix of strong brand + content “freshness” the new pages were picked for the index. That is my quick interpretation.
How To Fix The Mess
1 - Avoid users landing on wrong pages
To map 301 redirects, you need a complete list of every duplicate URL deployed in the subfolder. Running a regular Screaming Frog crawl agains any Shopify store, triggers HTTP 429 Too Many Requests errors for every page or you do the crawl very slowly.
I am in a rush to fix this to what I did instead of waiting for a crawl to complete:
I got all pages from the sitemaps and do 1-on-1 mapping, for example:
/en/products/p1234 will redirect to /products/p1234
Same page without the language folder prefix
To add the redirects on Shopify you just go the the settings and add a standard CSV. “Nothing spectacular”, like my buddy Patryk Wawok would say.
2 - Deactivate the pages
As opposed to other CMS, Shopify won’t trigger a redirect unless that page is deactivated. To deactivate a language (market) you go to the Shopify store settings and just remove the language:
You can deactivate an entire language subfolder with a few clicks
With this action, all pages in the subfolder will just be deactivated and all your redirects will take users to the original pages.
3 - Remove Sitemaps
To remove the sitemaps of the new language folder, you do not have to do anything extra (fiew!). By deactivating the language, Shopify removes all pages from the sitemaps.
4 - Request Index Removal
It is the index-removal request in the Google Search Console what I am experimenting with.
Right before I requested the index removal I had these second thoughts:
Before you request an index removal, make sure you understand all consequences
Original pages lost their rankings to the language version. The original page was relegated to be an “ignored“ page that does not meet the search intent.
Original pages won’t be in rankings: When the language folder gets removed from the index, the original pages will not automatically take their place (despite the redirects).
Original pages have to earn their rank from scratch: There will be a delay from the moment the language folder gets de-indexed and when the original pages trigger back their rankings.
The redirects were working:
Passing the page value from the folder pages to the original pages
Language folder started loosing rankings steadily.
Language folder pages were decreasing too
The language folder started loosing momentum after redirects were in place.
Because the redirects were working and the language folder was (and still is) ranked, if I would have removed all language pages, the overall website would have dropped in performance significantly.
Instead, redirects are taking users to the right place and helping Google to find and index the old pages. Implementing an index removal would stop this process.
📩 You Are Invited: Tech SEO for LLMs at Scale
My buddy Jules Davis CEO at Scalerrs invited me to talk Tech SEO at scale…
You are also invited!
We’ll get into:
1/ how AI search systems discover and access your content
2/ crawler access, robots.txt, CDNs and bot protection
3/ site architecture, internal linking and structured data
4/ how to test whether important content is actually retrievable
5/ what changes when you’re working across large, complex websites
and so much more!
Free Tech SEO analysis + 1-on-1 session
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If you want to participate respond to this email with "INDEX CHECK". If you are chosen I will follow up asap.
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Let’s Meet Up Offline
My next speaking gig is in Vienna, come say hi!
That’s it for today :)
Until next time 👋
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