While doing a site audit this week, noticed a subtle variation of the Shopify Web Pixels Manager bug. Instead of “web-pixels-manager” being shown in the URLs, it’s now “wpm”. These pages are sadly still getting indexed for some it seems.
The Shopify Support team previously suggested that the issue had been sorted.
This issue impacting the indexing results of Web Pixel Sandbox on Google has now been resolved on our end. As Google controls their own indexing, it may take some time to see the result. If you continue to experience any issues, please try clearing your cache, or let us know by posting a new topic with as much detail as possible. Thanks for your understanding and patience!
01-26-2023 08:44 AM
The Shopify Web Pixels Manager Bug lives on.
Yeap … like others … both variants have been blocked via ROBOTS.TXT however the erroneous URLS continue to show up in Google Search Console as indexed regardless.
It continues to be a nightmare for others according to the Shopify Community pages. Shopify has done a NoIndex & NoFollow and blocked the wpm@ in robot.txt. The problem with that is if Google already indexed a lot of wpm@ pages, the no index will not work if there is also a block Disallow wpm@ in the robot.txt.
All the indexed pages are therefore stuck in the Google caches. The last update is that there working on a fix to unblock it from the robots.txt. This way the no index will work and drop all the wpm@ indexed pages.
Update (1st June 2023)
Step 1: Unblock URLs in robots.txt
IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure that instances of Disallow: /cdn/wpm/*.js remain.
If you made previous changes to your robots.txt file to prevent /wpm@ and /web-pixels-manager@ from being indexed, these changes now need to be undone. Make sure these URLs are NOT blocked in your robots.txt file.
Step 2: Use Google’s Removal Tool
Request the temporary removal of your /wpm and /web-pixels-manager URL patterns in Google Search Console. This will prevent these pages from appearing in search results for about six months, after which time Google should recrawl and recognize the noindex directive and keep them out of the index.
Typically, Google’s best practices are to not use the Removal Tool and instead wait for the pages to drop naturally. Google, however, has been very slow to drop these thin-content pages, and we do not suggest you wait, as your rankings could potentially be negatively impacted in the interim.
While the removal could take up to a week, often it takes place within 24 hours and sometimes even faster. Keep an eye on the Removal Requests and the status should change from Processing request to Temporarily removed when complete.
See Definitive SEO Guide to Shopify’s Web Pixel Manager Problem
