A customer made a big boo-boo last week.
She contacted me asking why JSON-LD for SEO wasn't working for her store.
I started with what I normally do. I opened her site in one tab and Google's Structured Data Testing Tool in another tab.
That's when I noticed that her entire store was passworded.
The Shopify "coming soon" page.
Thinking she might have a new store that hasn't launched yet, I did a google search.
I found about a 100 pages indexed by Google. Many with rich snippets already showing for her products. Price, reviews, availability...
The things that other stores fight for.
She had a store.
It was getting crawled and listed by Google.
And had it enough trust built up for Google show rich snippets for her products.
Then she put a password on the store, slamming the door in Google's and every customers face.
Needless to say, I responded politely and mentioned that since she has a password on she's blocking everyone including Google from seeing her store. Eventually, Google will start removing pages from her site and she'll have to start over with SEO.
Hopefully she'll reopen soon and can try to resurrect her SEO.
That's why you should never just close up shop while you're renovating. There are a dozen ways to stop taking orders without losing your search traffic and rich snippets.
Getting those rich snippets is a difficult task in and of itself.
Before Google will even glance your way, you need to configure all of the structured data for your store. That's not an easy process unless you use an app like JSON-LD for SEO to automate it for you.
Eric Davis