Easy Lockdown has a feature called Hide collections/products from sitemaps which is used to hide products from search engines and the Shop app or website. This option is available when creating locks for Selected content when you're locking collections and their products, just collections, or just products.

When this setting is enabled Easy Lockdown will set a special metafield seo.hidden on the locked collections/products and give it the value 1. Once enabled, this will ensure:

1. The products will not show up in your store's XML sitemap
2. The products will not be visible in storefront search
3. The products online store pages will include the <meta content="noindex"/> tag to prevent them from being indexed by search engines such as Google
4. The products will not be visible in the Shop app or website

Troubleshooting

In our testing, when applying this setting, there is a significant delay before products are hidden from the Shop app/website, usually we see the changes take effect after 1 hour, but it could be longer.

Additional information

The following information is from a Shopify help article:

seo.hidden is a system metafield that can be used by third-party apps for data storage when they're hiding a resource from search engines and sitemaps. If you receive a message that says Namespace and key. seo.hidden. Namespace and key are already taken. View metafields without a definition, then seo.hidden is being used by third-party apps and isn't available to modify in the Shopify admin. If you want to add definitions to each content type that's already using seo.hidden, then you can create a definition for existing metafields.

References

• See Shopify's article on hiding a page from search engines

Updated on: 05/22/2026