Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
-
Hey there!
My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try.
The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/
However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site.
https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/
And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially.
I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work.
Any insight would be immensely helpful.
Thanks!
- Mike
-
I checked the page source. You can do this by heading to any web page, right clicking and selecting "view page source".
In Shopify, you can output the canonical url using the canonical_url object. I found this here: https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/canonical-urls
{{ canonical_url }}
-
I concur. Check with the business owner to see why both domains are operable. If there isn't a technical reason, redirect all traffic to the main domain.
-
I checked the theme.liquid file in between the head tags and I don't see anything referencing a canonical URL.
Where do you see that a canonical URL is set?
-
Unless there is a technical or business reason for keeping the second url, it would be best to redirect everything to the primary url.
Go to: Shopify Admin > Online Store > Domains
- Make sure all your domains are added, and that the correct domain is set as the Primary domain
- Make sure "Traffic from all your domains redirects to this primary domain" is set
Alex
-
So the secondary URL shouldn't do a full redirect to the main URL?
-
Thanks for the insight =]
-
Hello Mike,
This may be hurting your presence on one or the other site. Duplicate content is typically frowned upon. You can get around this by simply assigning a canonical URL in the head of the HTML. A canonical URL tag tells the search engine "hey, the content is also accessible here but the official page is actually at example.com".
I went ahead and checked the HTML of both pages and they already have a canonical URL set to the main website address you posted. So it looks like you're good to go!
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
-
301 Redirects for Multiple Language Sites in htaccess File
Hi everyone, I have a site on a subdomain that has multiple languages set up at the domain level: https://mysite.site.com, https://mysite.site.fr , https://mysite.site.es , https://mysite.site.de , etc. We are migrating to a new subdomain and I am trying to create 301 redirects within the htaccess file, but I am a bit lost on how to do this as it seems you have to go from a relative url to an absolute - which would be fine if I was only doing this for the english site, but I'm not. It doesn't seem like I can go from absolute url to an absolute url - but I could be wrong. I am new to editing the htaccess file - so I could definitely use some advice here. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amberprata0 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Referring domain issues
Our website (blahblah).org has 32 other domains pointing to it all from the same I.P address. These domains including the one in question, were all purchased by the website owner, who has inadvertently created duplicate content and on most of these domains. Some of these referring domains have 301's, some don't - but it appears they have all been de-indexed by Google. I'm somewhat out of my depth here (most of what I've said above has come from an agency who said we should address this before being slapped by Google). However I need to explain to my line manage the actual issues in more detail and the repercussions - any anyone please offer advice please? I'm happy to use the agency, or another - but would like some second opinions if possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LJHopkins0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Hosting images on multiple domains
I'm taking the following from http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html "Splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you're using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org" What I want to do is load page images (it's an eCommerce site) from multiple sub domains to reduce load times. I'm assuming that this is perfectly OK to do - I cannot think of any reason that this wouldn't be a good tactic to go with. Does anyone know of (or can think of) a reason why taking this approach could be in any way detrimental. Cheers mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0