The SEO Issue With Shopify’s Canonical Tags

Transcription:

Hi, I’m Chris Long with Go Fish Digital and welcome to another episode of “60-Second SEO”.

Today we’re going to talk about one of the most common SEO issues we see with Shopify sites.

So here I’m on the Slinger website. They sell a lot of different bags for different sports, such as tennis and pickleball. I’m on one of their category pages.

When I go on one of their category pages and then click an individual product, I can see that in the product URL, there is this /collections/ URL path that has /collections/ and /products/ in the URL. However, what’s interesting is when I actually go and check the canonical tag of this products page, it only has /products/ in the URL path.

So here, I’m going to go to this individual URL. We can actually see the exact same content exists on only the /products/ URL. These are actually the canonical pages.

So what’s going on here in this category page is this page is actually linking only to duplicate content. This page is linking to products with /collections/ in the URLs, when really it should only be linking to product pages with only /products/ in the URLs.

So this idea that Shopify sites will some by default set up category pages that link to non-canonical product pages is one of the more common SEO issues we see. Fortunately, is a pretty easy fix.

So something to look out for if you have a Shopify site. Are you linking to your canonical product pages? Do they have just /products/ in the URL path or do they have /collections/ and /products/ in the URL path?

About Chris Long

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital. With 10+ years of SEO experience, Chris works unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology. Chris has advised on the search strategies for clients such as GEICO, Adobe & The New York Times. He is a contributor for Moz, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. He is also a speaker at industry conferences such as MozCon, SMX East, BrightonSEO and more.