Hi guys,
I'm a novice really when it comes to SEO, yet have taken it in house for the next year or so, firstly because I have had my fingers burnt twice...and secondly, to allow me to recoup some of the loss from my prior campaigns.
One thing I have noticed on my site (which uses a Shopify E-commerce CMS), is that Shopify duplicates a url for each my products.
An example of this is
http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/collections/designer-radiators-heating/products/reina-aliano
http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/products/reina-aliano
Both products provide exactly the same information, yet appear in different ways subject to how the customer finds them.
I contacted Shopify to find a fix to this issue when I noticed a high amount of Duplicate Title Tags in my SEO crawl. Their response was as follows.
Using a rel canonical link will help prevent duplicate content issues with search engines. All you need to do is add this line of code:
**<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />**
** before the tag in the theme.liquid file. It’s that simple :)**
The theme liquid file basically generates the outer template for the whole site, and is only compromised when over-ruled.
This all seems a little too easy for me, so I am hoping whether someone can elaborate as to whether this will work or not, as I'm not entirely sold on their response. I was always under the impression with canonical tags, that they should be added to the header section of the duplicate page in question, which refers back to the original page.
The code I have been told to add above implies that the canonical tag would be added to every page in my site so the Google robot would have a hard time in finding anything at all of relevance
Thanks in advance for any assistance with this.
Kind Regards
Phil Scott
Vida Homes
