As default most Shopify themes can create an awful lot of Duplicate Content – multiple unique URL’s for the same products. This is very bad for SEO.
The good news is that it is relatively easy to fix and in this article we will show you exactly how you can do that.
Why is Duplicate Content a problem for SEO?
Google do not want to index the same – or very similar content on more than one URL. It just takes up more space without adding any real value to search users.
When Google find Duplicate Content – between pages on your site or other sites, they will typically filter out one or more of them and you can’t control which one they might keep.
And what is even worse – when Google filter out pages from your shop it will have a negative impact on your entire site. So even good pages will also decrease in rankings.
So we want to avoid Duplicate Content.
Product URL structure in Shopify
All products in your Shopify shop is located under /products/ – like this:
/products/name-of-productCopy
However, most often links to your products from collection pages include the collection path – like this;
/collections/name-of-category/products/name-of-productCopy
If you click a product from one of your collection pages then you can verify if you have this problem. If not then you can safely move on. But if you do please read below …
Isn’t CANONICAL-tags enough?
Shopify automatically insert a CANONICAL-tag on your product pages pointung to the original location. This tells the search engines which version to index.
The problem, however is that CANONICAL-tags are not always working. Sometimes Google ignore them or some technical glitch happens. In any case that leaves you with Duplicate Content problems – and the damages to your SEO that it often lead to.
Removing the collection links to products
Removing the collection part of the product links is quite easy. But you need to dig into the code.
Go to:
Online Store -> Themes -> Customize -> Theme Actions -> Edit Code
Which file exactly to edit depends on your theme. In some it will be called: product-grid-item.liquid. You have to find where your products in collections is output.
In this file you should remove the filter “within: collection“. There may be more filters, as the example below – just remove this one.
It should end up like this:
After saving your file all your links should be fixed. Just remember to remove all instances. Some times your theme can have multiple locations where the product links with the collection filter is added.
That’s it.
To be sure everything is right you may want to crawl your website with a tool like Screaming Frog.