Are you struggling to attract customers to your Shopify store despite having high-quality products and a visually appealing website? While factors like design and product selection play a role, technical SEO issues can also impact your store’s visibility. One such challenge that often goes unnoticed is duplicate content—a common issue in Shopify stores that can affect search engine rankings.
Search engines prioritize unique, high-quality content, but when they encounter multiple pages with similar or identical content, it becomes harder for them to determine which page to rank. As a result, your store's visibility may suffer.
The good news is that this issue can be effectively managed. By addressing duplicate content, you can improve your store’s SEO performance and enhance the shopping experience for your visitors. In the next section, we’ll explore why duplicate content occurs in Shopify and provide actionable steps to prevent it.
How Duplicate Content Affects Your Shopify Store
Search engines are always in constant search of the best results that they can offer to users. They have a problem deciding which of the pages should be considered more relevant each time they come across several pages with similar or even identical content. This can result in:
- Google may choose the wrong page version, leading to a loss of ranking positions.
- Crawl budget may be wasted as search engines spend time indexing irrelevant pages instead of important ones.
- Backlinks may be distributed across multiple similar pages instead of being consolidated into a single authoritative page, reducing their SEO impact.
- Visitors may be redirected to pages they did not intend to access, leading to a poor user experience.
Another issue that is associated with the default setting of Shopify is that it creates more than one URL for a particular product or page. Fortunately, it is possible to avoid such problems with the assistance of SEO.
Removing Duplicate Product URLs from Multiple Collections
One of the most typical problems associated with Shopify SEO is when a product is placed in several collections. Shopify creates different URLs for the same product depending on the collection, for example:
- yourstore.com/collection1/product-a
- yourstore.com/collection2/product-a
While both URLs present the same product to the search engines, they are two different pages, which is a problem of duplicate content.
Solution: Use a Single Canonical URL
To overcome this problem, you need to edit the Shopify theme and ensure that all the links lead customers to the product page instead of the collection page.
- Navigate to Shopify Admin > Sales Channels > Online Store > Themes > More > Edit code.
- Open product-grid-item.liquid inside the Snippets folder.
- Locate this code:
<a href="{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}" class="product-grid-item">
4. Replace it with:
<a href="{{ product.url }}" class="product-grid-item">
This means that the URLs of the products become unique and do not split the SEO value between the URLs.
Resolving Pagination Issues on Collection Pages
Another problem is pagination in Shopify collections. It is also important to note that there are several URLs that can refer to the first page of a collection.
- yourstore.com/collections/womens-shoes
- yourstore.com/collections/womens-shoes?page=1
Since the two URLs show the same content, this is not good for SEO because search engines will consider it as two different pages.
Solution: Remove the "?page=1" Parameter
Because of the issue of having multiple URLs with the same content due to pagination, it is recommended to remove ?page=1 using JavaScript.
Here is the JavaScript code that you can include in your theme:
if (window.location.search == '?page=1') {
window.history.replaceState({}, document.title, window.location.pathname);
}
This means that the first page of a collection always has the correct primary URL to avoid the creation of another URL.
Preventing Duplicate Content from Tag and Filter Pages
Shopify has a feature for filtering products by tags, and this creates more URLs that search engines may consider as different pages. For instance:
- yourstore.com/collections/shoes?tag=running
- yourstore.com/collections/shoes?tag=sneakers
These are two web pages that contain similar information or information that is almost similar and therefore can be considered duplicate content.
Solution: Block Tag and Filter Pages from Search Engines
To avoid such a situation, you should edit the robots.txt file:
- Navigate to your Shopify admin panel and find the robots.txt file of your store.
The following directive should be added to avoid search engine indexing of tag and filter pages:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /collections/*?*tag=
This tells the search engines not to index any URL that has the parameter ?tag=, which is useful in avoiding the generation of duplicate pages in the search engine.
How to Solve Multiple H1 Tags Issue in Shopify Themes
It is also important to note that some of the Shopify themes use more than one H1 tag on the same page. This is particularly true when the store logo and the page title are placed in the H1 tags, which is not helpful for search engines.
Solution: Use Only One H1 Tag on Each Page
- Navigate to Shopify Admin > Sales Channels > Online Store > Themes, and then click on the ‘Actions’ button to edit the code.
- Open the header.liquid file.
- Find this code:
<h1 class="site-logo">
<a href="{{ root_url }}">{{ shop.name }}</a>
</h1>
- Replace it with:
<div class="site-logo">
<a href="{{ root_url }}">{{ shop.name }}</a>
</div>
In this way, there is only one title on the page, which is the title of the main page, which is optimal according to the SEO rules.
Ensuring a Consistent Domain Structure
Another problem that is associated with the problem of duplicate content is the presence of multiple copies of the same domain. For instance:
- http://yourstore.com
- https://yourstore.com
- http://www.yourstore.com
- https://www.yourstore.com
If not redirected correctly, Google may consider them as different websites and divide the SEO value between them.
Solution: Use a 301 Redirect to a Single Primary Domain
- Navigate to Shopify Admin > Online Store > Domains.
- For example, the Primary Domain is https://www.yourstore.com.
- All other domain versions will be automatically forwarded to this primary domain by default by Shopify.
This is useful in ensuring that all the traffic and SEO benefits are directed to a single URL.
Conclusion – How to Improve Your Shopify SEO Now
This is a problem that can negatively affect your Shopify store rankings without your knowledge. But now, you have a clear plan of how to approach it and make the necessary changes.
- Change your theme to use canonical product URLs.
- It is also important to avoid the use of pagination using JavaScript.
- Make sure that tag and filter pages are not indexable by search engine crawlers.
- Do not use several H1 tags to make the text more comprehensible to the search engine.
- Do not register your store with multiple domains, but use only one main domain.
Do you require the services of a professional Shopify SEO expert? At Brew My Idea, we help businesses resolve issues like duplicate content and optimize their stores to attract more customers. Call us now to improve your rankings and grow your online business!
