Duplicate content in Shopify - subsequent pages in collections
-
Hello everyone!
I hope an expert in this community can help me verify the canonical codes I'll add to our store is correct.
Currently, in our Shopify store, the subsequent pages in the collections are not indexed by Google, however the canonical URL on these pages aren't pointing to the main collection page (page 1), e.g. The canonical URL of page 2, page 3 etc are used as canonical URLs instead of the first page of the collections.
I have the canonical codes attached below, it would be much appreciated if an expert can urgently verify these codes are good to use and will solve the above issues? Thanks so much for your kind help in advance!!
-----------------CODES BELOW---------------
<title><br /> {{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
{% if page_description %}{% endif %}
{% if current_page != 1 %}
{% else %}
{% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %}
{% if current_page == 1 %}{% endif %}
{% if template == 'product' %}{% if product %}{% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %}{% endif %}
-
The advice is no longer current. If you want to see what Google used to say about rel=next/prev, you can read that on this archived URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20190217083902/https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
As you say Google are no longer using rel=prev/next as an indexation signal. Don't take that to mean that, Google are now suddenly blind to paginated content. It probably just means that their base-crawler is now advanced enough, not to require in-code prompting
I still don't think that de-indexing all your paginated content with canonical tags is a good idea. What if, for some reason, the paginated version of a parent URL is more useful to end-users? Should you disallow Google from ranking that content appropriately, by using canonical tags (remember: a page that uses a canonical tag cites itself as non-canonical, making it unlikely that it could be indexed)
Google may not find the parent URL as useful as the paginated variant which they might otherwise rank, so using canonical tags in this way could potentially reduce your number of rankings or ranking URLs. The effect is likely to be very slight, but personally I would not recommend de-indexation of paginated content via canonical tags (unless you are using some really weird architecture that you don't believe Google would recognise as pagination). The parameter based syntax of "?p=" or "&p=" is widely adopted, Google should be smart enough to think around this
If Search Console starts warning you of content duplication, maybe consider canonical deployment. Until such a time, it's not really worth it
-
Hi, I came across this page because I have the same question about page 2 of collection pages. In my case, the URL for page 2 of a collection would be site.com/collection?p=2, with the canonical tag for the page also pointing to site.com/collection?p=2.
I am concerned that this will create duplicate content, because the collection description is repeated on each page of the collection.
Is your advice still current? The link in your response no longer exists, and according to webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html, Rel=prev/next is not an indexing signal anymore.
Thanks!
-
Your code looks as if you have more than one canonical tag deployed on a single web-page, so that would be a bad deployment. One page can only have one canonical parent and that's that
It seems that you are attempting to use canonical tags to address pagination (paginated content, e.g: site.com/collection/page-2/ or site.com/collection?p=2) on your collection URLs, is that right?
Don't use canonical tags to address pagination. A paginated URL is canonical for the specified 'page' of content, which may (under some rare circumstances) be more useful to search users. Do not de-index your paginated content by making those paginated URLs canonical elsewhere
Instead, use Google's rel=prev/next guidance as outlined here.
If you de-index paginated URLs by using canonical tags, the rankings that some of those paginated URLs (due to their unique comments or tabbed content) may have gained, will not usually be given to the canonical parent. Although you will have more control over the user-journey, you will lose out on some long-tail traffic
Instead use rel=prev/next which will tell Google that the content is a subsequent 'page' of another document. This will make the paginated URLs 'less' likely to rank, but will allow them to rank for very specific search queries. Then you have the best of both worlds
Some people think that, prev/next and canonical are actually compatible. I am a little uneasy with regards to that, but if you do decide to utilise canonical tags to force one page to rank more often - don't deploy them without rel-prev/next
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Possible duplicate content issue
Hi, Here is a rather detailed overview of our problem, any feedback / suggestions is most welcome. We currently have 6 sites targeting the various markets (countries) we operate in all websites are on one wordpress install but are separate sites in a multisite network, content and structure is pretty much the same barring a few regional differences. The UK site has held a pretty strong position in search engines the past few years. Here is where we have the problem. Our strongest page (from an organic point of view) has dropped off the search results completely for Google.co.uk, we've picked this up through a drop in search visibility in SEMRush, and confirmed this by looking at our organic landing page traffic in Google Analytics and Search Analytics in Search Console. Here are a few of the assumptions we've made and things we've checked: Checked for any Crawl or technical issues, nothing serious found Bad backlinks, no new spammy backlinks Geotarggetting, this was fine for the UK site, however the US site a .com (not a cctld) was not set to the US (we suspect this to be the issue, but more below) On-site issues, nothing wrong here - the page was edited recently which coincided with the drop in traffic (more below), but these changes did not impact things such as title, h1, url or body content - we replaced some call to action blocks from a custom one to one that was built into the framework (Div) Manual or algorithmic penalties: Nothing reported by search console HTTPs change: We did transition over to http at the start of june. The sites are not too big (around 6K pages) and all redirects were put in place. Here is what we suspect has happened, the https change triggered google to re-crawl and reindex the whole site (we anticipated this), during this process, an edit was made to the key page, and through some technical fault the page title was changed to match the US version of the page, and because geotargetting was not turned on for the US site, Google filtered out the duplicate content page on the UK site, there by dropping it off the index. What further contributes to this theory is that a search of Google.co.uk returns the US version of the page. With country targeting on (ie only return pages from the UK) that UK version of the page is not returned. Also a site: query from google.co.uk DOES return the Uk version of that page, but with the old US title. All these factors leads me to believe that its a duplicate content filter issue due to incorrect geo-targetting - what does surprise me is that the co.uk site has much more search equity than the US site, so it was odd that it choose to filter out the UK version of the page. What we have done to counter this is as follows: Turned on Geo targeting for US site Ensured that the title of the UK page says UK and not US Edited both pages to trigger a last modified date and so the 2 pages share less similarities Recreated a site map and resubmitted to Google Re-crawled and requested a re-index of the whole site Fixed a few of the smaller issues If our theory is right and our actions do help, I believe its now a waiting game for Google to re-crawl and reindex. Unfortunately, Search Console is still only showing data from a few days ago, so its hard to tell if there has been any changes in the index. I am happy to wait it out, but you can appreciate that some of snr management are very nervous given the impact of loosing this page and are keen to get a second opinion on the matter. Does the Moz Community have any further ideas or insights on how we can speed up the indexing of the site? Kind regards, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Minimum amount of content for Ecommerce pages?
Hi Guys, Currently optimizing my e-commerce store which currently has around 100 words of content on average for each category page. Based on this study by Backlinko the more content the better: http://backlinko.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/02_Content-Total-Word-Count_line.png Would you say this is true for e-commerce pages, for example, a page like this: http://www.theiconic.com.au/yoga-pants/ What benefits would you receive with adding more content? Is it basically more content, leads to more potential long-tail opportunity and more organic traffic? Assuming the content is solid and not built just for SEO reasons. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
Manage category pages and duplicate content issues
Hi everybody, I am now auditing this website www.disfracessimon.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
this website has some issues with canonicals and other things. But right now I have found something that I would like to know your opinion. When I was checking parts of the content in google to find duplicate content issues I found this: I google I searched: "Chaleco de streck decorado con botones" and found First result: "Hombre trovador" is the one I was checking -> Correct
The following results are category pages where the product is listed in. I was wondering if this could cause any problem related with duplicated content. Should I no index category pages or should I keep it?
The first result in google was the product page. And category pages I think are good for link juice transfer and to capture some searchs from Google. Any advice? Thank you0 -
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
Best strategy for duplicate content?
Hi everyone, We have a site where all product pages have more or less similar text (same printing techniques, etc.) The main differences are prices and images, text is highly similar. We have around 150 products in every language. Moz's algorithm tells me to do something about duplicate content, but I don't really know what we could do, since the descriptions can't be changed to be very different. We essentially have paper bags in different colors and and from different materials.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Which duplicate content should I remove?
I have duplicate content and am trying to figure out which URL to remove. What should I take into consideration? Authority? How close to the root the page is? How clear the path is? Would appreciate your help! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ocularis0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1