Anyone familiar with Shopify will understand the problems of their directory structure. Every time you add a product to a 'collection' it essentially creates a duplicate. For example...
may also appear as:
It's not uncommon to have up to six duplicates of each product.
So my question is twofold:
- Firstly, should I worry about this from an SEO point of view? I understand the desire to minimise potential duplicate content issues and also in focussing the 'juice' on just one page per product. But I also planned on trying to build the authority of the collection pages. If I request Google not to index the product pages which link off the collections, does this not devalue these collections pages?
- Secondly, I understand the correct way to fix these is using 'rel canonical' tags, but I'm not clear about HOW to actually do this. Shopify support has not been very helpful. They have provided two different instructions, so just added to the confusion (see below).
Shopify instruction #1: Add the following to the theme.liquid file...
<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 %}
Shopify instruction #2: Add the following to each individual product page...
So, can anyone help clarify:
- The best strategic approach to this inherent SEO issue with Shopify (besides moving to another platform!)? and
- If 'rel canonical' tags is the way to go, exactly where and how to apply them?
Regards,
Murray