As default Shopify generate pages for each of your vendors (brands), product types, product- and blog tags. Depending on your theme and the internal linking you, and your users may not actually see them, but they are there. And if there are any links to them Google will often index them. This is most often not good for SEO, so we need to fix that!
What is the SEO-problem with Tag-pages?
The tags-pages do most often not have sufficient unique and optimized text for them to work well for SEO. It’s just a list of snippets and links to pages with no good TITLE, META-description and body copy.
As a consequence Google will most often see them as thin or duplicate content pages and filter them out. And if they do this will hurt your entire website, so even your good pages is less likely to rank for relevant terms.
So unless you find a way to make sure all those tag-pages mentioned above DO have great and sufficient text, TITLEs and META-data then we need to exclude them from either crawling or indexing.
You may argue that it would be great to also rank in Google for vendors (brands) and many of the tagged keywords. And yes, you may be right, but the automatically generated pages Shopify generate for these elements are just not good for that.
Instead, if you want to optimize for these keywords you need to create optimizable page types for that.
How to better optimize tag-keywords
For product types and -tags creating collection pages to target those keywords will most often be the best option. The same could be done for vendor pages.
For blog-tags we recommend that you focus on an actual blog posts to rank for those keywords. The tags should only be used for automation of related links (which is something you will be able to do with the SEO Master App).
How to de-index tag-pages
The good news is that it’s actually quite easy to solve the problem. The easiest way is to add a NOINDEX-tag on all the above mentioned tag-pages.
Even if you do not have visual – and crawlable links to these autogenerated pages we recommend that you add the NOINDEX, just to be safe.
NOINDEX Product Tags and Blog Tags Pages
The code below should be placed in the HEAD-section of your main theme layout file – often the name is: theme.liquid
{% if current_tags %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
{% endif %}NOINDEX Vendor Pages
The code below should be placed in the HEAD-section of your main theme layout file – often the name is: theme.liquid
{% if template contains "collection" and collection.handle == "vendors" %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
{% endif %}NOINDEX Product Types Pages
The code below should be placed in the HEAD-section of your main theme layout file – often the name is: theme.liquid
{% if template contains "collection" and collection.handle == "types" %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
{% endif %}