Shopify SEO Breakthrough: Solving 'Crawled, Currently Not Indexed' & JSON-LD Errors

View original discussion by TimberOps on Shopify Community →

Hey fellow store owners! Let's talk about something that can be incredibly frustrating for any of us trying to get our products seen: Google indexing. Specifically, that head-scratching situation where Google says your pages are "Crawled – currently not indexed." It feels like Google's giving you a half-nod and then walking away, right?

I recently followed a fascinating discussion on the Shopify community forums where a merchant, TimberOps, was battling this exact problem. They had pages that looked identical – same structure, same template, same metadata – yet some were indexed perfectly, and others were just... sitting there, unindexed. What started as a suspicion about Shopify's sitemap behavior and CDN issues turned into a really insightful deep dive with the help of some sharp community minds.

Understanding 'Crawled, Currently Not Indexed': It's Google's Choice

One of the first, and most crucial, takeaways from the thread was the need to separate two distinct issues. As Roman79 and Francesco Guiducci from IFG eCommerce both emphasized, "Crawled – currently not indexed" means Google successfully fetched your page. It saw it, read it, and then made a conscious decision not to put it in its index. This isn't a technical block like a 'noindex' tag or a crawl error; it's a quality or relevance decision by Google.

So, what makes Google decide a page isn't worth indexing, even if it looks structurally perfect to you? The community highlighted several reasons:

  • Thin or Duplicate Content: Are your product descriptions unique? If you're using supplier copy, or if pages are just slight variants with minimal unique text, Google might see them as low value or too similar to other pages. Roman79 specifically suggested pulling ignored products and comparing them to indexed ones for shared descriptions or thin content.
  • Crawl Budget & Demand: Google has a finite "crawl budget" for your site. It prioritizes pages it deems most valuable, has strong internal links to, or sees user demand for. As ahsandoesntcare pointed out, identical templates don't make pages equal to Google; it weighs demand, link strength, and unique value.
  • Internal Linking Prominence: How strongly are these ignored pages linked from elsewhere on your site, especially from high-traffic pages? Strong internal linking signals importance to Google.

The Sitemap Saga: A Separate, But Important, Battle

TimberOps initially suspected intermittent timeouts on subordinate sitemaps (like /sitemap_products_1.xml) were preventing discovery. While the community clarified that a page already "Crawled" wasn't *directly* suffering from a sitemap timeout (since Google clearly found it), the sitemap issue itself is still critical. Mustafa_Ali explained that inconsistent sitemap fetching means Google might not be reliably *discovering* some pages in the first place, or getting timely updates for recrawling.

Maximus3 initially pointed out that putting a sitemap URL into Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool isn't the right way to test it. Instead, you should check the Sitemaps report directly in Search Console. If you're seeing intermittent timeouts there, as TimberOps eventually confirmed, that's definitely something to push Shopify Support on. As IFGeCommerce suggested, providing exact timestamps of failed loads gives Shopify's team concrete data to correlate with their CDN logs.

A Critical Breakthrough: The JSON-LD Error

Here's where the discussion took a very actionable turn. TimberOps later updated the thread, reporting new structured data issues: an "Invalid top level element 'string'" in the JSON-LD output on some product pages. This was a huge clue!

V.marychenka jumped in with a brilliant diagnosis and fix. This error means your product's structured data, which helps Google understand your products better for rich snippets, is being output as a single quoted string instead of a proper JSON object. This can absolutely hinder indexing and rich snippet eligibility.

How to Fix the 'Invalid Top Level Element 'String'' JSON-LD Error:

This fix involves a small code edit in your Shopify theme. Always duplicate your theme as a backup before making any code changes!

  1. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Themes.
  2. Find your current theme, click Actions > Edit code.
  3. In the code editor, search all files for structured_data.
  4. Look for the line within an