How To Improve SEO On Shopify: Get Rid Of Duplicates

Hello everyone, this is my first post on Techendo and I hope that it will be valuable to all Shopify users.

I want to highlight some Shopify specific SEO issues and provide instructions on how to resolve them. Lets get started!

Main Shopify SEO Problem

Shopify is a great platform which allows to create powerful e-commerce websites. I personally really like it, but from SEO perspective Shopify is not ideal. The main SEO problem with Shopify is that it creates a lot of duplicates which can be indexed by Google. Any SEO specialist will tell you that any unwanted pages which are indexed by Google can be really harmful to your rankings: it can cause content duplicate, titles duplicate issues which decrease the relevance of pages.

Just imagine, you sell outdoor lawn mowers. You created few collections in your Shopify store:

• Lawn Mowers
• Battery-Powered Lawn Mowers
• Self-Propelled Lawn Mowers
• Electric (Corded) Lawn Mowers

This structure can help your visitors navigate easily on the website, but what is the most important - that suchmost importantly this kind of structure can help you make an effective SEO for these targeted pages. If you've already done keyword research you can optimize these pages for main focus keywords allocated to these pages. You can use built-in Shopify SEO tools to assign unique optimized title tags, write optimized category description. But the devil is in the detail.

Duplicate SEO Issues Because Of Pagination

You probably know, that if you have a lot of products, only limited amount will be displayed on the collection page, the rest products will be located on paginated pages.

So what will happen if each of your collections will have for example 10 pagintated pages. You will have 10 paginated pages for each collection which will be focused on the same keywords as main collection page. Using example from above, you will have 40 collection pages (10 pages for Lawn Mowers parent collection, 10 pages for Battery powered lawn mowers, 10 pages for Self-propelled lawn mowers and 10 pages for corded lawn mowers).

Duplicate SEO Issues Because Of Tags

If you use tags for filters in your Shopify, you will have one more reason of duplicates. By default - all tags pages are allowed for indexing. That is why if you have 30 different tags (for sizes and brands for example) you will receive a lot of the same pages on different URLs.

How Can It Affect My Shopify SEO?

All these pages will have the same content and title tags. How is Google supposed to identify which page is more relevant to the allocated keywords when Google indexed 10 absolutely identical pages? It is impossible. That is why it is very important to avoid any overlaps and duplicates on your website. Each important from SEO perspective page should be unique. And all pages which contain the same (or very similar) content and important SEO tags should be canonicalized with the main page OR disallowed for indexing.

How To Fix These SEO Issues In Shopify?

Despite the fact, that some of recently created Shopify themes have implemented rel="prev", rel="next" tags - it doesn't resolve the problem, because main URL of collection is not specified correctly. That is why I recommend to implement rel="canonical" tag which will points to the main page of the collection.

I developed this code which you can easily implement on your website (add this code to the head section of theme.liquid template)

<!--SEO Addon START By Dmitriy From Techendo-->
 {% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %}
 <link rel="canonical" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}" />
 {% endif %}
 {% if template contains 'collection' and current_page > 1 %}
 <link rel="canonical" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}" />
   {% endif %}
 {% if request.path contains 'types' %}
   <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
{% endif %}
<!--SEO Addon END By Dmitriy From Techendo-->