…and this goes on forever, creating a pointless crawling path for Google etc., countless URLs and errors appearing in Search Console and other reporting tools.
These pages also have themselves as the canonical URL.
e.g. bissell.com.au/collections/all-products?page=31
canonical is bissell.com.au/collections/all-products?page=31
So, how do we stop Shopify from creating these empty pagination URLs?
Hello, does Google actually crawl the ?page=30 URL and onwards or you’re just guessing ?
If they are crawled, then it’s a problem in the theme. The pagination snippet is supposed not to create links out of the pagination limits.
If they aren’t, everything good. The page URL parameter is just like any other variation of the URL, as long as you have the correct canonical and you don’t directly link to it, you are clean.
Nothing will ever prevent Google to crawl and index what they want, they’re just recommendations. Just make sure via a crawling tool like Screaming Frog that you cannot reach the unwanted pagination URLs, check the canonical and that’s all, there’s nothing more you can do.
”Hello, does Google actually crawl the ?page=30 URL and onwards or you’re just guessing ?”
It’s crawling them. As I said, I discovered the issue after it was reported in Search Console (Indexing > Pages> Crawled - currently not indexed)
”If they are crawled, then it’s a problem in the theme. The pagination snippet is supposed not to create links out of the pagination limits.”
The pagination links are not the issue though.
When you’re on page 29, the > arrow is not a link, and doesn’t point to page 30. They stop as they should. (Apologies, I wasn’t clear in the ticket that the pagination links were fine. Updated).
But Google is still being directed to the ongoing URLs from somewhere. Can you suggest more specifically where in the theme the issue might be?
“Nothing will ever prevent Google to crawl and index what they want, they’re just recommendations.”
Understood, but that is not the issue here. It’s not crawling legitimate content that we could block with robots.txt or nofollow, etc. It’s that it’s being directed to these non-existant string query URLs somehow. That’s what I’m trying to eliminate.
I can’t say for sure, only a crawling tool like Screaming Frog will tell you which pages lead to the ?page=30 URL. I would put a coin on unexpected pagination snippet behavior. Could also be backlinks pointing to the URLs. Either way, I really can just suggest where to look
