Merchant Center provides you with multiple options to control how and where your products appear on Google. You can temporarily hide products, permanently remove them or just prevent them from showing in certain places like Shopping ads. This article provides a clear overview of the different ways to manage your product visibility on Google.
On this page
- Understanding product visibility on Google
- Options for controlling your products
- Remove products from your account
Understanding product visibility on Google
Google gets product information in two main ways:
Managed products: These are products that you can manage directly in your Merchant Center. These products are usually uploaded to Merchant Center manually or by automated product data submission. You have full control over these 'managed products', including their attributes, visibility and appearance across Google surfaces.
Unmanaged products: Google also discovers products through website crawls, even if you don't have a Merchant Center account. This information is used to power organic search results, including rich snippets on Google Search and product listings on Google Images. You have less direct control over these 'unmanaged products', but you can influence their appearance.
Options for controlling your products
Here are some different methods of controlling your product visibility:
In Merchant Center
Hide your products temporarily
- Pause products: This option temporarily prevents your products from appearing in Shopping ads and cost-free listings for up to 14 days. You can pause products for short-term stock issues, website maintenance or during holidays. You can reactivate paused products easily after the set period.
- Mark as 'out of stock': If a product is temporarily unavailable, setting its availability to 'out of stock' will prevent the product from showing in most shopping experiences. This is a good alternative to pausing, if the product will be unavailable for longer than 14 days. Update the availability
[availability]attribute in your product data.
Long-term exclusion and destination-specific exclusions
- Visibility status of products: The 'Visibility' column lets you know if your product is being shown on Google. In addition to hiding or showing products, you can also archive them. Archived products are hidden from your main product list, your diagnostics (Needs attention) tab, performance reports and from serving on Google. You can view your archived products in the 'Archive' folder and restore them at any time.
- Excluded destination
[excluded_destination]attribute: Use this attribute in your product data to prevent your products from appearing in specific Google destinations, such as Shopping ads, display ads, cost-free listings or cost-free local listings. This allows for granular control over where each product is shown. Learn more about the excluded destination[excluded_destination]attribute.
Permanent removal and control
- Stop managing products: If you're automatically adding products from your online shop and want to stop managing specific crawled products:
- Go to Data sources in your Merchant Center account. Under the 'Product sources' tab, you'll find the 'Found by Google' section.
- Select the 3-dot icon
beside the product, then select Stop managing products.
- This removes the products from your managed inventory, preventing them from showing in Shopping ads and cost-free listings. However, they may still appear in organic search results as unmanaged products.
- Hide all automatically found products: This option completely hides all products found automatically by Google through crawling.
- Go to Data sources in your Merchant Center account. Under the 'Product sources' tab, you'll find the 'Found by Google' section.
- Select the 3-dot icon
- This prevents those products from appearing in any Google Shopping experience, including organic search results.
- Archiving products: You can now archive products in Merchant Center. Archiving a product removes it from your main product list, diagnostics and from serving on Google surfaces (like ads and cost-free listings). This helps to keep your active offer list clean and manageable.
- Delete products: This option permanently removes products from your Merchant Center account. It's useful for products that you no longer sell or want to advertise. However, it doesn't guarantee their removal from organic search results if Google has crawled them previously.
- If you delete a product from your website or data source, it may temporarily display a 'Product page unavailable' error if Google's crawler attempts to re-index the page before its cache updates. If the product was automatically found by Google, ensure that you navigate to Data sources > Found by Google and select Stop managing products in the 3-dot menu to prevent it from resurfacing as an error.
beside the product, then select Stop managing products.
Note: In the case of manually added products, you will have the choice to either archive them (removes from view but keeps data) or permanently delete them from the system entirely.
On your website
Remove crawled product data from Search and other Google properties
- Noindex meta tag: Adding the noindex meta tag to your product pages instructs Google not to index them, effectively removing them from all Google Search results. This includes all organic search results, rich snippets and any other listing based on crawled data. This is a powerful tool for complete removal, but it requires access to your website's HTML code.
- Robots.txt Robots.txt tells search engines like Google which pages they can crawl, and Googlebot will respect these instructions. While Google usually indexes crawled pages, it can index pages without crawling them if they're linked from other sites or submitted through a sitemap. In other words, robots.txt indirectly reduces the chances of indexing by preventing crawling.
- Data-nosnippet attribute: This HTML attribute can be used to prevent specific sections of text on your product pages from appearing in rich snippets. Data-nosnippet is helpful for hiding sensitive information or specific details that you don't want displayed in search results.
It's important to choose the method that's best aligned with your needs and level of control. If you need clarification or further assistance, consult the Google Merchant Center Help Centre or contact Google Merchant Center support.
Remove products from your account
All products expire from your Merchant Center account 30 days after the last refresh. Products can be refreshed by resubmitting your product data source or scheduling regular data source uploads. Google will also regularly check your website and refresh your products automatically if the product data can be validated, for example, by the crawling of schema.org structured data on your product landing pages.
You can remove product data or specific products at any time, provided that the items don't have active policy violations or account-level disapprovals. To remove all products from a specific data source, follow the steps below:
- Go to Settings
in the left menu.
- Select Data sources.
- Under the 'Product sources' tab, select a product data source that you want to remove.
- Select the 3-dot menu icon
- Select Remove.
Optional: If you want to permanently remove the products, delete the products from your product data source before the next upload. If the products aren't removed from your data source, they'll be added to Merchant Center again on the next upload.
Use the expiry date [expiration_date] attribute: Add the expiry date to any item that you would like to remove on a specific date. Learn more about the expiry date [expiration_date] attribute.
Individual product deletion
If you added products manually or want to remove an individual item immediately without deleting its entire data source:
- Select Products under 'Products and shop' in the left navigation menu.
- Under the 'All products' tab, select the title of the product that you want to remove.
- Select Delete product.