I had to re-read your comment several times, LOL, but still not sure I understood it so revisited the whole issue.
For both of my public stores, the "all products" pages ( zazzle.com/store/STORE NAME/products )
have the "noindex,follow" tag. That makes sense to me as that listing of products isn't particularly useful for searchers or us as shop owners (we want people finding our home pages where they can see our collections & categories and About info) so won't be indexed itself, but, it can still be crawled and the pages it links to (in this case the product pages) can be indexed. So that's all good in my book.
My store home pages ( zazzle.com/store/STORE NAME )
have nothing specified and per Google “The default values are index, follow and don't need to be specified” so that's all good, too.
My problem is, after re-scrolling all 90 comments in this thread, it's very difficult to tell who's seeing "noindex" on their "all products" pages (we all should be seeing it there) and how many are seeing it on their actual store home page as well. So it's difficult to tell how prevalent it is and if there's any pattern to it occurring. But, while it would understandably be a downer to have your store home page set to be un-indexable, I don't think it's the end of the world unless it also includes "no follow" and I haven't found that on anything yet. If it's not set to "nofollow" then all the links to products can still be crawled and indexed. And probably unpopular opinion, but what are the odds someone is going to be searching for your store name or maybe keywords in your store tags or About text if that even factors in? I think it's more likely people would be searching for a specific thing, like "nautical welcome mat" or whatever. In which case you want them to find your product(s) which is being indexed even if your store home isn't. That said ...
The two products linked to in this thread where people reported the product page itself had a "noindex" tag, as of today, 9/17, neither one of them have it. Not this one created 7/4 or this one created 8/21. I visited some random product categories in the MP and sorted by Newest and even the newest showing (9/10 in all cases I happened to click on) did not have noindex on them. Then I went to your store and sorted by newest, and some of them did have "noindex", until about 8/30 when the tag stopped appearing. Then I looked at some of my products, the newest created 7/2, back to one created in Jan, and none of them had "noindex". So this is very limited and non-scientific but does makes me think maybe new product + some other unknown criteria leads to a temp noindex tag.
But, here's something else really interesting ...
This folded card of yours, created date of 9/15, currently has the "noindex" in the source. If I search the product title on Zazzle (Vintage Holly Berries Beige) it comes up in the results. If I search that exact phrase on Google, there are only four results. The first one goes to SnuggleHamster, this same design but on a flat card. The second result goes to your store home page on Zazzle where this folded card is at the top of your "Latest Created" section. So Huh! Even though the product page itself currently has a noindex tag and didn't come up in the Google search, your store home did because that search string appears on it. Wild. I have never liked the "latest created" section on stores but hmmm, now seems like it's a back-door so to speak into getting your new product picked up by search outside Zazzle although in a roundabout way. Assuming of course your store home page itself doesn't have a "noindex". 😜
I know I am really rambling but if you're still with me, back to the crux of your post...
As a result, we noindex particular store pages, but products in the stores would not be impacted and will remain available and searchable on our site. Google is also able to discover the stores and products when crawling Zazzle.com.
"we noindex particular store pages" - that could reasonably be taken two ways. They noindex certain store home pages, or they noindex particular pages within stores. My immediate interpretation without thinking about it was the latter but now I have no idea what they meant.
"but products in the stores would not be impacted and will remain available and searchable on our site" - seems true as as above I was able to find your card via Zazzle MP search even though the product itself had a noindex on it.
"Google is also able to discover the stores and products when crawling Zazzle.com" - also seems true as even if the store is noindexed, Google can still crawl it and explore it and index the products it leads to.
* Sorry, I know this was long and maybe not making sense but it was a rough Moday LOL and it gave me something else to focus on. 🙂
Yeah, I think we're all focused on "noindex" but aren't talking about follow/nofollow which to me is the more important thing 'cause "nofollow" would cut the whole discovery chain off but as stated, I haven't seen "nofollow" on anything yet.
Also, despite my compulsion to analyze things, I ironically enough agree with @Malissa that (paraphrasing here) we probably shouldn't poke around too much in coding we don't really understand. Let sleeping dogs lie as they say?
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that you personally don't understand things. I was just agreeing with this general mindset while knowing it's ironic as I'm all in favor of poking around myself.
I think when we go poking around code and don't have an understanding on how a website works under the hood we are opening ourselves up to a lot of headaches for nothing! lol..
I wonder for a long time why Zazzle’s sharing tool includes „nofollow“? 🤔
@JimCarnicelli @ColsCreations Well, I still have a hard time understanding the reasoning behind it. It makes perfect sense in your example. But in real life (for me) I have created a product last night (as an example) which l could promote through Zazzle‘s sharing tool which tells Google not to index my product page? What??? 🤯 Why should I promote my product on any website using this specific code when it shouldn’t be indexed? That just doesn’t make much sense to me. 😳
PS: The code for my newest product:
quote
<div style="text-align:center;line-height:150%">
<a href="https://www.zazzle.com/z/ar0gnpk2?rf=238748736489762753" rel="nofollow"><img src="https://rlv.zcache.com/harris_walz_vote_blue_stop_project_2025_qr_code_keychain-r_i2fxbb_1024.jpg?ma..." alt="Harris Walz Vote Blue 'Stop Project 2025!' QR Code" style="border:0;" /></a>
<br/>
<a href="https://www.zazzle.com/z/ar0gnpk2?rf=238748736489762753" rel="nofollow">Harris Walz Vote Blue 'Stop Project 2025!' QR Code</a>
<br/>by <a href="https://www.zazzle.com/store/sanfrancisco?rf=238748736489762753" rel="nofollow">SanFrancisco</a>
</div>
unquote
Above coding also omits the product type but I have mentioned that too already more than once in this forum. It’s correct (meaning the product variable is there) in the coding you receive when you newly have created the product but other than that it’s always missing.
I had to look to see what you meant and now I see. If you use the link icon to get the html code, rel="nofollow" is included inside the <a href> tag forming the link. That use of nofollow seems to be almost exclusively about the relationship between the linking page and the linked-to page and not passing on SE "juice" to the linked-to page. Nofollow is basically telling the SE not to count that link in ranking the linked-to page, and it prevents the linking page from being seen as and penalized in their own ranking for 'spamming' by the SEs. And it's treated as almost a requirement for paid and/or affiliate links. It's admittedly a bit fuzzy but I get the overall concept and would be surprised if Z wasn't inserting the nofollow in such autogenerated links for promoting.
Nofollow can also be used in the meta on a page like this <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> which tells the crawlers not to follow any links on the page. There's lots of reasons this might be used but it doesn't prevent the linked-to pages from being indexed as they could be discovered other ways and thus indexed (unless that particular page has a 'noindex'.) That's the use I was referencing in my previous comment. A meta nofollow on our store homes would greatly reduce crawlers' abilities to find our stuff but I've yet to encounter the meta nofollow on one of my Z pages.
Back to the "noindex" thing - in poking around this afternoon, I see "noindex,follow" on all my Collections (even the few that are cross-sell) and cat pages as well, whether my own cat or the Zazzle made ones. But, with the right keywords and narrowing down to just Zazzle domain, I can find the products within those collections/cats via Google even though the main Collection/cat page is nowhere to be seen in results. And in the end I think that's what we all want - for off-site searchers to be led directly to our product that matches what they are looking to buy. We don't want them getting sixteen pages that the product they're looking for might be on and they have to scroll around and click-through to find. So Im good with that, too. 😉
Assuming you're on a desktop/laptop you should be able to right-click just about anywhere on the page and get a context menu like this:
You should see "View page source" listed. Click it. Then press CTRL-F (or CMD-F on MacOS) and search for "robots". If it's there the <meta> tag should look like this:
Hope that helps.
