How to fix seo category empty on Shopify Plus
Either populate the empty category with products, or add a noindex tag and remove it from your navigation so Google does not waste crawl budget on a page with no content.
Steps for Shopify Plus
- Follow all Shopify steps above — Shopify Plus gives access to the same admin UI plus Launchpad and Scripts.
- For enterprise stores with many empty collections, use the Bulk Editor or the Admin API to query collections with product_count == 0 and batch-apply noindex or deletion.
What is seo category empty?
A category (also called a collection) page that contains zero products is considered "thin content" by search engines. There is nothing of substance for Google to index — no product listings, no descriptions, no prices — just a shell of a page. This can happen when you create a category in advance, remove all products from it, or when seasonal inventory runs out and is never restocked.
Google actively discounts thin-content pages, and having too many of them across your site can drag down the quality signal for your entire domain, hurting rankings across all your pages — not just the empty one. Empty category pages also waste Google's crawl budget: every minute spent crawling a blank page is a minute not spent discovering your actual product and blog pages. From a user perspective, a shopper who lands on an empty category will immediately leave (high bounce rate) and lose trust in your store, directly costing you conversions and revenue. Removing or hiding these pages is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort technical SEO wins available to any store owner.
See the complete Seo category empty guide for every platform and the full background.
Not sure if your Shopify Plus store has this?
Run a free SEOLZ scan — we’ll find seo category empty and every other issue across your whole site.
Scan my site free