Before blaming Google for not indexing your store, rule out the obvious: that the store itself is the one blocking it. Four pieces of configuration — robots.txt, sitemap, noindex, and canonical — decide what can even enter the index. And in PrestaShop, any one of the four can be quietly sabotaging you.
The silent sabotage
These failures don’t throw errors, don’t break the site, and don’t warn you: the store works perfectly for visitors while Google runs into closed doors. A noindex tag left over from development, or an overly broad Disallow rule, can stay invisible for months — quietly costing you sales the whole time.
The 4 checkpoints
- robots.txt — check for blanket blocks or rules that catch more than they should. A `Disallow` meant for filters can end up closing off entire categories.
- sitemap.xml — make sure it exists, responds, and lists your actual URLs. Without it, Google discovers your catalog blind.
- meta noindex — no page you want to rank should carry this tag. It’s the classic survivor of a “remove before going live” step that never happened.
- canonical — every product page should point to itself (or to its real canonical version, deliberately). A misconfigured canonical redirects indexing to a different URL.
How to check it manually
robots.txt and sitemap.xml can be checked in a browser in two minutes: yourdomain.com/robots.txt and your sitemap URL. The hard part is the rest: noindex and canonical have to be checked in the HTML of every single page — and a catalog has hundreds of them. Checking the homepage and three random product pages isn’t an audit: problems tend to hide exactly in the URLs you don’t check, and they come back every time you touch your theme, modules, or SEO settings.
One-off manual checks
You check 4-5 URLs whenever you remember to. No representative sample, no record kept, and the problem reappears with the next theme or module change.
Systematic audit with a traffic-light verdict
A live sample of your store checked in one pass: a red/amber/green verdict and a concrete list of problem URLs with the exact reason for each.
The free tab in Zeyvro Faro
The technical audit is the first tab in Zeyvro Faro, and it’s free — no connecting Google, no sign-up required. It checks your robots.txt for blanket blocks, confirms your sitemap.xml exists, and crawls a live sample of your own store (homepage plus recently touched categories and products) looking for noindex tags and canonicals that don’t add up. The result: a red/amber/green traffic-light verdict and a concrete list of problem URLs, each with its exact cause.
That lets you rule out — or confirm — that your configuration is the problem. If your setup is clean and you’re still not getting indexed, the answer lies on Google’s side of things — and that’s the second half of the module.
💡 Configuration green across the board and still have product pages missing from Google? Then it’s time to ask Google directly: how to find out which of your store’s URLs are actually indexed.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to connect Search Console for the technical audit?
No. Zeyvro Faro’s technical audit tab works without any connection to Google: it reads your robots.txt, your sitemap, and a live sample of your own store. And it’s free.
Which URLs does the audit actually check?
A live sample of your store: the homepage plus recently updated categories and products — where a recent change is most likely to have introduced a problem.
Is a misconfigured canonical as serious as a noindex?
It can be: both take the URL out of the index. The difference is that noindex is explicit, while a misdirected canonical is harder to spot — you end up telling Google to index a different page without even realizing it.
How often should this audit be repeated?
After every theme change, module install, or SEO tweak — that’s when problems tend to creep in. Having the audit one click away in the back office is what actually makes you repeat it.
Rule out self-sabotage in minutes: a traffic-light verdict, problem URLs, and the reason behind each one.
Discover Zeyvro Faro →Zeyvro builds PrestaShop 8 modules from a real store running in production. Unobfuscated code.