How to hide products from Shopify search
If you want to hide a product and prevent people from finding it on your Shopify store, there are a few steps you need to take.
Obviously you can just set the product as a Draft, which only allows your Staff to view it, but maybe you want to hide a product from your storefront but still allow users to access it via a direct link.
This could be because you’ve got a special offer product, one which you only want to promote to specific customers via an email mailshot or AdWords campaign, or perhaps something isn’t quite ready and you want to share with a member of your team via a secret link, without giving them access to your store’s back end.
It’s easy enough to hide products on Shopify – you just don’t add them to a collection, and ensure sure that you have set up a manual ‘All’ collection which excludes the product.
However, the one place that the product will continue to show up is in your site’s search area. If your product has a similar name to another one of your products, someone may accidentally stumble across it when searching for the similarly-named product.
Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to hide a product from your shop’s search. It involves adding some custom metadata.
This is the data you want to add:
"namespace" : "seo" "key" : "hidden" "value" : 1 "value_type" : "integer"
If you aren’t familiar with Shopify metadata, that may appear a whole load of useless information. So what does it actually mean, and how do you use it?
Metadata is additional data that you can add to your products – it’s typically used for custom fields which can appear in your themes, in addition to the standard product title and description.
Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t make it easy to edit metadata “out of the box”. The easiest way to do so is by installing the ShopifyFD Chrome Extension, downloadable here.
Once you install it, you should see a new little icon next to your Chrome address bar, in the Extensions section:
From the Shopify back end, load up the product that you want to hide from Shopify search, then just click the icon. The page will reload and you should see a new ‘Metafields’ section on the right hand side:
Just fill it in with the details we listed above, so that your Metafields section looks like this:
Then, click the ‘Save as Integer’ button. Ensure you click the ‘Save as Integer’ button, not the standard ‘Save’ button, or it won’t work correctly.
All done, your product will no longer show up when someone searches for it in your shop’s search bar.
As an added benefit, this metadata will also add a ‘noindex’ tag to your page, preventing Google from adding it to its search index if it happens to stumble across it.
As long as you hide it from all of your Collections, it’ll now be a hidden product that you can link to manually without any of your normal customers being able to come across it.
How to hide products in bulk from Shopify search
If you have more than a handful of products, having to go into each one and set its metadata manually will quickly become tedious.
Thankfully, Shopify has a ‘Bulk Editor’, which allows you to quickly edit product data for all of your products on one screen.
Just navigate to the following URL, being sure to replace SHOPNAME with the relevant name used to access your shop’s admin section.
https://SHOPNAME.myshopify.com/admin/bulk?resource_name=Product&show=image%2Ctitle%2Cvariants&edit=metafields.seo.hidden%3Anumber
If you don’t know what to replace SHOPNAME with, then log into your shop admin section and take a look at the URL in your address bar. You should see that it begins with https://SHOPNAME.myshopify.com/ – you’ll just need to take the value of SHOPNAME and change it in the URL above.
You should see all of your products in a list, alongside the value for their ‘SEO Hidden’ field, which is blank by default.
Just click into the blank field and change the value to 1. Do this for all products that you want to hide from search, hit the Save button at the top of the window, and that product will disappear from your site search.
Note, if you later want the product to re-appear in your site search, you will need to change the value to 0. Simply leaving the value blank doesn’t seem to make the product re-appear, based on our testing.