Hi there @MUDE. There are two issues here, and in order to help you I need to explain a couple of weird internet-related issues. Your problem is not (as you say) because “everything is so complicated on Square,” however. It’s much more complicated than that, so jumping to conclusions doesn’t help you, in this case.
If I’m understanding what you wrote correctly, all of your mattresses are available for sale online because you have them defined that way in your item catalog. However, you expected that simply hiding the Mattress category would remove those item pages. It does not, and it can’t. Hiding the category ONLY hides the category and the items in the overall listing. The item pages are still there, because you didn’t mark them in your item catalog as not available for sale online. There’s a big different between having an item available for sale and hiding it.
In order to fix your issue, you first need to go to your item catalog. Select every mattress item, then click the Actions button at the bottom of the screen. Select “Update sales channels” and then make them unavailable (not Visible or Hidden), after which you click the Update button. This will make all of your mattresses unavailable for sale on your website, not just hidden on your website item listing pages.
Now, to a bigger issue. You can do this today and those item pages will disappear. However, WHEN they will disappear on the internet and on search engines is a different problem. This is because Google (Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc) have indexed your mattress pages. It will take them a while to notice that they have been removed from their indices. This means that, now, when customers see those pages in search engines and click on them, they will see a 404 Page Not Found error, because Square has removed the page but the index entry still exists. This is the search engine’s problem, not Square’s.
Only two things will fix this. First, time. Search engines crawl web sites regularly. But because the internet is HUGE, it will take time, especially for those of us who aren’t Amazon, etc. If you want, you can hopefully speed this up by creating separate website tools accounts for your Google Listing, and Bing, etc, and then requesting a forced re-index of your site. If their bots see and approve that request they will do it, eventually.
I hope that helps. I’m available if you run into issues or problems, or have further questions.
Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)
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