Googlebot Did Not Stop Crawling Some Shopify Websites

Last week, we saw reports that some Shopify sites were showing massive declines in crawling activity from Google’s Googlebot. John Mueller of Google responded this morning that this was “temporary drop in how we calculate how much we can crawl” adding these sites are in a “good state” and there is nothing to worry about.

John Mueller wrote on Twitter “we looked into the sites that were mentioned and for all of them it was a temporary drop in how we calculate how much we can crawl. This happens from time to time, and catches up after a few days usually.” “As far as the engineers are concerned, these are in a good state, crawling will speed up again, and there’s not something that needs to be done. It’s kinda confusing from the outside though,” he added.

And yes, as of this morning, Shopify site owners and webmasters are reporting normal crawling again.

Tim Dennis flagged me about this last week on Twitter and I’ve been watching it since but there is still no clear answer on what is the issue yet. He did share charts from a few Shopify sites he runs showing the flatlining of Googlebot activity as reported in Google Search Console’s crawl stats report:

Here is a video he recorded showing this:

Yeh, all the Shopify stores I have access to have flatlined. No new pages indexed for a couple of weeks. https://t.co/C1u4ZKKOi0

— Tim Dennis (@tim_fully) February 4, 2022

It is not just Tim who noticed this, others are reporting this as well.

Like I said both Shopify and Google are looking into it. John Mueller from Google said he passed it on to the teams at Google to look at it:

Thanks – I passed these on to folks internally to check out.

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) February 5, 2022

And Kevin_Indig from Shopify also said he is looking into it:

Looking into this

— Kevin_Indig (@Kevin_Indig) February 4, 2022

Here are the tweets from John Mueller of Google this morning about what the issue was and was not:

As far as the engineers are concerned, these are in a good state, crawling will speed up again, and there’s not something that needs to be done. It’s kinda confusing from the outside though 🙂

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) February 7, 2022

Here is the update from an SEO who has some Shopify sites saying Googlebot is back to normal again for some of the sites, not all:

Similar for me! One out of the three sites we saw impacted though has now recovered in the crawl. But the sitemap couldn’t be fetched on the 9th Feb

— Jess (@JessicaMal_) February 7, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.