Why are my 'hidden' items appearing in the website's Site Map (sitemap.xml file)

[stumcm]

I recently used Square Online's site verification process FAQ document to submit my Square Online store's sitemap.xml file to Google and Bing search engines.

Today I looked at the search results for my store in Google search, and was surprised to see pages for my 'Hidden' items appearing in the search results!

For example, the products "Greeting card - 3 items" and "Postcard - 4 items" are products that I only use for my Square Point of Sale when selling products directly to customers at art markets. I have not uploaded any images or descriptions with these items, as they are not meant for customers to be able to choose on the website.

These are products that I have set as 'Hidden' in the settings of my Square Online store, so I am really surprised to see them listed in the sitemap.xml file for my online store .

My question is: is there any setting that I can change to stop these 'Hidden' items from appearing in my sitemap.xml file? Or can your devs please fix this problem with the way that the sitemap is generated.

[Seamus · Accepted solution]

Hey @stumcm,

If these hidden items are only intended for sale in person, the easiest way to resolve this issue is to remove them from your Online Store altogether. To do this go to the Square Online overview, then Items > Site Items.

Tick the boxes to the left next to the items you don't wish to display at all online, then Bulk Edit to the right hand side (It will say "Edit" if you select a single item). From here you can remove items from your Online Store, but they'll stay for sale in your Square Point of Sale app.

Regarding hidden items appearing in Google searches though, my understanding of this feature is that it's intended to make the item available via a direct link for anyone with the link, though without displaying it on your website. Because the link does still technically exist, this is probably why it's still being picked up by Google. I did try to find a way to de-list an item page from SEO, but it doesn't look like this seems to be an option at the moment. So, definitely remove the item from your site if the intention is not to sell it online at all, it won't prevent you from selling it in person. "Hidden" has a slightly different intended use case, which is why it looks like the links may still be found on Google - which I agree is not ideal, but probably why we also include the option to remove items from your website altogether.

Hope this helps!

[stumcm]

Perfect. That solved my problem. Thanks for answering.

[stumcm]

Hi there @Seamus and others, it is one week after my last post indicating that the problem was solved. However, I have realised that the problem is not fully fixed.

Following your advice, I used the Bulk Edit -> "Remove from site" feature to remove a whole lot of 'point of sale only' items from being visible on my website.

The good news is that this removed those items from being visible via the list of items visible in the Dashboard to my store.

The bad news is that these items are still listed in the sitemap.xml file for my Square Online store. And it is still possible to visit these 'empty' URLs.

I don't especially mind people being able to visit the empty URLs, but I think that it is bad that the sitemap.xml file is linking Googlebots to these low-quality pages. It is not a good SEO practice to have a sitemap that is linking to low-quality pages like these, which is something that could affect my SEO rankings. Can you suggest a way that I can 'refresh' the sitemap.xml file so that it no longer includes all of these pages that I don't want crawled?

[Laurie_]

Thanks for sending through this update, @stumcm!

I've gone ahead and escalated your case to our Ecom Support Team for further assistance here, as I'm unsure what further steps we would need to take on the Square Online platform to ensure these pages are removed from the sitemap.xml file.

Once I receive a response from this team, I'll be sure to circle back here with an update for you.

Great job on removing those items from your Square Online site in the meantime!

[stumcm]

Great. FYI here are some examples of formerly 'Hidden' (now, Removed) products. Your team can check whether or not they disappear from the sitemap:

https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-archival-a3-framed/16
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-archival-a3-unframed/14
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-archival-a4-framed/15
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-archival-a4-unframed/13
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-standard-a3-framed/17
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-standard-a3-unframed-one-item/11
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-standard-a3-unframed-two-items/
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-standard-a4-framed/
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-standard-a4-unframed-one-item/9
https://stuartmcmillen.square.site/product/art-prints-standard-a4-unframed-two-items/10

There are other examples, but those are a good representative sample.

[Laurie_]

Thanks for sending this through, @stumcm. We'll be in touch with you shortly!

[Laurie_]

Hi, @stumcm, I've just received an update here from our Ecom Support Team which I'll relay to you below.

For Square Online sites, it is intended behaviour for a hidden item to continue to show on the sitemap as the sitemap itself cannot be edited. The advice from the team if you're wanting these items completely gone, is to mark them as Unavailable in Square Online to prevent them from being listed in the sitemap. 

In terms of SEO advice, we are not SEO professionals and these types of queries do not fall under our scope of support at this time. We do offer a few helpful resources that can assist you with improving your SEO on your Square Online site but beyond this, any SEO-related questions would be best directed to an SEO professional. 

In the meantime, considering that improving your SEO appears to be the main focus, we would highly encourage you to connect a custom domain to your Square Online site to increase searchability. 

Let us know if you require any assistance with the above suggestions, otherwise all of the best with your SEO tasks!

[stumcm]

Thanks for your reply @Laurie_

My follow-up question is wondering how exactly I make the items as Unavailable, if I have already used the 'Remove from site' option? The items that I want to remove from my Square Online sitemap simply do not show up in my list of items in Square Online anymore. Therefore I cannot actually see them any more.

Do I need to somehow log into Square Point of Sale to see those items, merge them across to Square Online, and then mark them as 'Unavailable'? If so, this solution seems to be a counter-intuitive way to remove items from my sitemap, rather than the action that I already did: removing them from my Online product list. I would also want a solution that allows me to continue to be able to use these 'items' in my Point of Sale merchant locations, but not online.

Please let me know the next steps I should try.

[Laurie_]

Hi, @stumcm, to clarify here, so long as the item is not available on your Square Online site, whether you have deleted the item or marked it as unavailable, we would expect these changes to reflect in your sitemap.xml file as well.

In saying all of this, the sitemap.xml file is an SEO tool and we don't provide SEO consultation for Square Online in our Support Centre, or via the Seller Community Platform, so we cannot 100% confirm how these changes should reflect in your sitemap.xml file. 

My advice from the previous post remains the same, we suggest you reach out directly to an SEO professional with these questions to help you troubleshoot this matter further.

[stumcm]

OK, good to know that both removing and marking as 'unavailable' should both serve to remove the items from the sitemap.

Maybe the website only re-generates its sitemap.xml file occasionally. I see that the current one was generated on 6 September (over 8 days ago). I'll keep an eye on things, and see if the website regenerates an updated XML in the future.

Update: the website's XML sitemap auto-generated to a new version on 15/09/2022, and the new version does not contain the items that I 'removed'. One technique I used was to re-add the items from my Square PoS archive into my Square Online catalogue, and then to mark as 'Unavailable', followed by a 'Remove'. Not sure if that is what triggered the new sitemap.XML to be re-generated, or if it was due to happen on a weekly timer anyway.