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 obtains product information in 2 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 via 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 different methods in which you can control your product visibility:
In Merchant Center
Hide your products temporarily
- Pause products: This option temporarily prevents your products from appearing in Shopping ads and 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
- Hiding products: Visibility refers to whether your product is currently being displayed on Google or ads locations. You can change how visible your product is by using the “Visibility” column in the products tab of your Merchant Center account. If you select a product in the Product list you will see a “Don’t show on Google” option which directs you to adjust the visibility settings.
- 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, free listings, or 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 store and want to stop managing specific crawled products, select "Stop managing products" in the "Found by Google" section of the “Data Sources” tab. This removes the products from your managed inventory, preventing them from showing in Shopping ads and 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. Select "Hide all automatically found products" in the "Found by Google" section of the “Data Sources” tab. This prevents those products from appearing in any Google Shopping experience, including organic search results.
- Delete products: This option permanently removes products from your Merchant Center account. It's useful for products 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.
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 no-snippet is helpful for hiding sensitive information or specific details you don't want displayed in search results.
It's important to choose the method aligned with your needs and level of control. If you need clarification or further assistance, consult the Google Merchant Center Help Center 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 re-submitting 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 anytime. To remove all products from a specific data source please follow the steps below:
In your Merchant Center account, click on the Settings & tools icon
.
Select Data sources.
Under the “Product sources” tab, select a product data source you want to remove.
On the 3 dot menu icon
Click 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 expiration date [expiration_date] attribute: Add the expiration date to any item that you would like to remove on a specific date. Learn more about the expiration date [expiration_date] attribute.