Main menu duplication

[MickEdwards]

I am working on a site that has just gone through a migration to Shopify at the very same time as Google did an update in October.  So problems from day 1.

All main menu categories have subsequently over the past 6 weeks fallen off a cliff.  All aspects of the site have been reviewed in terms of technical, link profile and on-page, with the site in better shape than several ranking competitors.

One issue that i'd like some feedback on is the main menu which has 4 iterations in the source.

• desktop
• desktop (sticky)
• mobile
• mobile (sticky - appears as a second desktop sticky but I assume for mobile)

These items that are "duplicated" menus are the top level menu items only.  The rest of the nested menu items are included within the last mobile menu option.

So

1. desktop menu in source doesn't include any of the sub-menu items, the mobile version carries all these
2. there are 4 versions of the top level main menu items in source

Should I be concerned?  Considering we have significant issues should this be cleaned up?

[MickEdwards]

A couple of other issues were uncovered with certain collections browser rendering.  Cleaned up menu duplication and these.  Monitoring.

[effectdigital]

You are right to be concerned and many in the SEO community don't really feel that Shopify has 'nailed' SEO yet. It started as a slightly nicer version of Wix where you could build your own site pretty easily but obviously they handle a lot of the eCommerce aspects as well (thus it's very attractive to business owners, sadly it's not great for SEO)

The community is expanding and the number of plugins and add-ons for Shopify is broadening. The problem is, many developers working on the Shopify platform don't have too much SEO experience (at least, that has been my experience of the Shopify community)

If you are finding that certain items are missing from the 'base' (non modified) source code, that is a concern. Google can technically crawl generated content and links (which are rendered client site), but that required headless browsers and client-side rendering. On average that takes 10x longer than basic source-scraping. Google's mission is to 'index the web', so although they have this new technology and functionality they wouldn't arbitrarily decide to take a 10x efficiency hit across all indexation (that would be nutty and would go against their prime directive)

Rendered crawling is deployed by Google for popular web pages. When it is used, it is not used with the same frequency as basic crawling - and not everyone gets that special treatment!

If you're not Santander or Coca Cola, you should be thinking about how you can help Google rather than how Google will "certainly use their latest technologies to help me, a small to medium business owner - at any expense!" - it just won't happen (sorry!)

The Shopify community is commerce and design led. One thing they are really bad at, is latching onto one-off isolated comments from Google  (such as "we can crawl JavaScript now!") and then applying that to everything without testing it first in iterations. The fact is, sites that perform more server-side rendering do still perform better than sites which rely too heavily on client-side rendering (especially as that drastically impacts page-loading speeds and burdens the end user)

If I was finding lots of critical stuff that didn't appear in the base (non-modified) source code and my site wasn't a household name, I'd be really - really concerned!

I am sure that the right Shopify designers and developers could sort it out for you, but it may be costly. Especially as devs in that community won't believe you that it's necessarry, and will fire loads of posts to you (from Google) stating that what they have already done is fine. Comments from the horse's mouth are useful, but not without greater context