Product category get’s translated automatically causing issues with google search console
Reproduction steps
When we assign product taxonomy - the english works perfectly for google search console, but If we change the language - google will throw Invalid value in field ‘category’ as we will have a translated value.
Additional info
We can use metafields and fill in the category, but It’s difficult to do for tens of thousands of products and maintenance is impossible for thousands of merchants.
We could add our custom map to English, but app embeds have limitations on liquid length.
If we had the option not to translate the category and It’s ancsestors in liquid directly - that would solve everything for us and thousands of merchants.
Hey @elilip - thanks for reaching out and sharing your use case. I’m looking into this.
Could you share one affected product URL, the rendered Product structured data containing category, and the expanded warning details from Search Console or a Rich Results Test result? That will help us check the exact value Google is flagging. Happy to set up a DM if you’d prefer to share those details there.
I’ll follow up here as soon as I have more to share!
We went ahead and made a workaround for them to set the english version through a metafield, but If someone has more than 100 products - It’s a big hassle, if more than 1000 products - quite impossible to set metafields for so many products manually.
category.gid is a stable node id regardless of storefront language, so instead of metafields per product you could ship one static GID to canonical English name lookup table built from Shopify’s public taxonomy data and render that for structured data. One table sized to the taxonomy, not one entry per product.
Hey @elilip - thanks so much for sharing the test result and explaining the challenges with the metafield workaround.
I’ve shared your feedback with the relevant team and it’s on their radar, although I don’t have a guarantee or timeline I can share. I’ll follow up on this thread if anything changes on that front.
