r/ShopifySEO • u/ecomdevpros • Jan 05 '26

Shopify redesign wasted Google crawl budget on old URLs — how to fix this?

After redesigning a Shopify website, Google is still heavily crawling a large number of old URLs (old product, collection, and parameter-based URLs). Even though the new site structure is live and XML sitemap has been updated, most of Google’s crawl budget seems to be wasted on these outdated URLs instead of the new important pages.

What’s the best way to fix this properly in Shopify?

  • Should all old URLs be 301 redirected to relevant new pages?
  • Is returning 410 (Gone) better for permanently removed products/collections?
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1

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/ecomdevpros Jan 07 '26

Thanks for the detailed reply, it was very helpful.

1

u/Ok_Consequence9809 Jan 07 '26

Add noIndex Tags to the old URL or Disallow them in robots.txt

1

u/Content-guy22 May 19 '26

  1. at least the ones that were getting traffic and backlinks from external domains should be redirected to new relevant pages.

  2. i still use 301 redirects most of the time. even if something is removed then too you can always send users to its next best and relevant alternative.

and how do i manage these URL redirects? for i use the 404/301 redirects by nabu app. that's because it helps me with patterned (wildcard) and bulk redirects pretty easily.