5 Common Shopify SEO Issues and How to Fix Them

Struggling to improve your rankings? Fix these common Shopify SEO issues and take your first steps towards optimizing your store for search engines.

Shopify offers plenty of out-of-the-box features and functionalities, making it a perfect solution for online businesses. It is powerful, flexible, and capable of building modern eCommerce storefronts.

But there’s a catch!

The platform also comes with a bunch of technical flaws and imperfections that may block your way to higher rankings. Some of these Shopify SEO issues are critical and need to be fixed asap! Ignoring them can be a dreadful mistake.

“An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”

List of Common Shopify SEO Issues

1. Shopify Duplicate Product Page URLs
2. Auto-Generated Tag Pages
3. Poor URL Structure in Shopify
4. Myshopify.com Web Pages
5. Multiple H1 Tags Issue in Shopify

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5 Common Shopify SEO Issues You Need to Fix Right Now

Let’s go through some of the common Shopify SEO problems along with their solutions for SEO optimization.

1. Shopify Duplicate Product Page URLs

No matter what platform you’re using, duplicate content can hit your rankings hard.

By default, Shopify offers collections that enable customers to navigate easily through the store and find products easily through categorization. But, this functionality can create Shopify SEO issues when not used correctly.

The users can access the product pages through two different paths: Directly & Through Collection, and the tragedy here is — the platform also creates two different URLs for the product pages.

Consider we have a product named Red Jacket in our Shopify store, which has been added to the Jackets category. Here, Shopify will create two different URLs for the product through which it can be accessed by the customer.

For example:

• https://example.com/collections/jackets/products/red-jacket (Link Present on the Collection Page)
• https://example.com/products/red-jacket (Direct Link)

Interestingly, Shopify automatically adds a canonical tag on the https://example.com/collections/.*/products/.* pointing to the main page https://example.com/products/.*

If you are facing any issues related to HTTPS or SSL, you can checkout out post on quick ways to fix SSL Unavailable in Shopify.

Albeit it signals Google to give more importance to the original product page, it creates hurdles in passing the link equity. The situation here is as follows:

• Category pages on the whole Shopify store link to pages with the /collections/ element in their URLs.
• These pages then signal the search engines to rank other product pages instead.

In short, the default Shopify architecture links to the product pages that can not be ranked by Google. This is one of the most common Shopify SEO issues faced by merchants.

The solution to Remove Duplicate Pages in Shopify:

In order to fix this issue, we want Shopify to use the original links to the products on the collections pages rather than using duplicate URLs containing the /collections/ element.

Follow the below-mentioned steps to fix this duplicate product pages Shopify SEO problem:

• In the Shopify admin, go to the Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit Code.
• Go to the Snippets folder, and select product-grid-item.liquid.
• Find the following code:
  <a href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”>
  and replace it with:
  <a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

This will remove the unnecessary collections element from the product URLs when accessed from the collections page and solve the duplicate product pages issue in Shopify.

2. Auto-Generated Tag Pages

In Shopify, product tags are pretty useful for the customers to find and organize the products in the store. But they are a major concern from the search engine optimization perspective and a nightmare for the SEOers. Here is why:

By default, the platform creates individual pages for the tags in the store.

Let’s say you are selling jackets and have used products with tags: denim, zipper, leather, etc. Here, Shopify will also create individual pages for the tag pages with the following URLs:

• https://example.com/collections/jackets/products/denim
• https://example.com/collections/jackets/products/zipper
• https://example.com/collections/jackets/products/leather

These pages will list all the products containing the individual tags, with no other useful information worth crawling for the search engines.

The catch here is that Shopify sets these tag pages to Index by Google, giving rise to another Shopify SEO issue.

You can find a list of all the tag pages in your Shopify store indexed by Google using the following search operator in Google:

site:example.com intitle:tagged

The solution to getting rid of tag pages in Shopify:

There are multiple solutions to this Shopify SEO problem. You can use any of the solutions below depending on your store:

1. Canonicalise Tag Pages to Collection Pages

The first way to get rid of the unnecessary tag pages being indexed in Shopify is to canonicalize them to the collections pages. This will inform the search engine crawlers not to give importance to the tag pages and pass the link equity to the collection pages. In order to do this, you need to edit the theme.liquid template and replace the <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" /> with the following code:

{% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %} <link rel="canonical" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}" /> {% else %} <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" /> {% endif %}

This will automatically canonicalize all the tag pages to the respective collection pages in Shopify. The pages are still indexed, and they also use the crawl budget.

2. Set Tag Pages to Noindex, Follow

If you just don’t want these unnecessary tag pages to be indexed by Google, then you can add a Noindex, Follow tag to the pages. It will inform the search engine crawlers not to add these pages to their index but to follow the links present on the pages.

You can do this by adding the following code to the theme.liquid template file of the web pages:

{% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %} <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> {% endif %}

The Noindex, Follow tag sends stronger signals to the search engines about the less importance of the pages. However, the crawl budget is still used.

3. Disallow Crawling the Tag Pages

The best way to get rid of this Shopify SEO issue of unnecessary tag pages is to disallow the search engines to crawl those pages. This can be done by tweaking the robots.txt file. Add the following rule in your robots.txt.liquid file:

{%- if group.user_agent.value == '*' -%}
{{ 'Disallow: /collections/*/*' }}
{%- endif -%}

This will block search engines from crawling any of the web pages in the /collections/any-collection/.* directory of your Shopify store. Change the default Shopify internal linking structure (as shown above) before adding this code. Otherwise, the default links to the product pages on the collection pages will not be crawled by the search engines.

3. Poor URL Structure in Shopify

There is no doubt in saying that the URLs in Shopify are not user-friendly. The default pages created by the platform will be created via subdirectory, making the URLs lengthier.

Let’s say you have a product named Red Jacket, and with the slug red-jacket, then the platform will structure its product page URL like this: https://example.com/products/red-jacket, where the ‘products’ element in the URL is just unnecessary.

The case is the same with other types of pages as well in Shopify. For example:

• https://example.com/products/red-jacket
• https://example.com/collections/jackets
• https://example.com/blogs/blog
• https://example.com/pages/other-pages-in-shopify

Not only is this a poor practice from the SEO perspective, but it can also affect the user experience. Unlike other platforms such as Magento, Shopify does not allow the creation of categories and sub-categories to organize the products in a better way.

The solution to fix poor URL structures in Shopify:

Currently, there is no solution to get rid of this restricted site hierarchy in Shopify. However, here are some best practices for organizing the product categories in your Shopify store.

• Add mega menus on the homepage.
• Using breadcrumbs schema markup helps Google understand categories and sub-categories.
• Interlink related categories with one another using relevant keywords as anchor texts.

4. Myshopify.com Web Pages

Shopify offers a free myshopify.com domain to all the stores with the store name as the sub-domain. For example, your store can be accessed through the your-store-name.myshopify.com when you create it.

This domain is fine to operate the store with, but it may make the store look amateur and is not recommended because of branding issues. Most store owners prefer adding a custom domain to their Shopify store.

After adding a custom domain to Shopify, it is essential to set it as primary and ensure that the your-store-name.myshopify.com web pages are no longer indexed by search engines.

Sometimes, web pages having the-store-name.myshopify.com domain may still be crawled and indexed by Google, which can turn into a Shopify SEO issue.

For example, using a Google search operator, I found over 50 pages of a well-set Shopify store – Pura Vida Bracelets with MyShopify.com domain indexed by Google. It has already connected its domain to its Shopify store.

Similarly, there is also a chance that your MyShopify.com webpages are being indexed by Google even after adding a primary domain. You can also use a similar search query — your-shopify-store-name.myshopify.com to find such pages indexed by Google.

The solution to de-index myshopify.com webpages:

• Go to Settings > Domains and ensure that the new domain is set as primary.
• Audit your website and ensure that none of the internal pages links to the old myshopify.com pages.
• Ask Google to re-crawl your website if you’ve recently made any changes or added the domain.

5. Multiple H1 Tags Issue in Shopify

Another common Shopify SEO issue is the h1 heading tag in the store logo/name.

According to Matt Cutts from Google, “too many h1s or bunched up h1s dilute your search and cause the Google crawler to think you’re spamming it.”

This points out that you should limit the number of h1 tags in your Shopify store to only one per web page.

Most of the Shopify themes assign an h1 tag to the store logo and sometimes also contain empty h1 tags, which can cause multiple h1 tags. It is also not a good practice to add the h1 tag to non-text content, such as images. Look at the following screenshot to better understand this Shopify SEO issue.

 

The chances of your store having a similar Shopify SEO issue are very high.

Right-click on any of your store’s web pages, and click on Inspect element to find out. Or, if that’s too technical for you, use tools such as Conductor for Chrome that lets you find common Shopify SEO issues, such as multiple h1s through a single click.

The solution to multiple H1 tags issue in Shopify:

In order to solve the h1 tag issue in the header logo, you need to replace the h1 tag with a div tag in the header’s liquid file. You can follow these steps to do that:

• Open the header.liquid file and find the h1 tag.
• Replace the h1 tag with a div tag and save the changes.
  

Follow similar steps to fix the multiple h1 tags issue in Shopify if you are experiencing it at any other place than the header.

Final Words

Shopify is a wonderful platform, yet some of the common technical issues make it a bit less than the best platform for SEOers. The good part is — these flaws can be easily fixed by using the solutions provided above. You can also hire Shopify SEO experts from Meetanshi to help you fix more such issues and optimize your store.

I hope you’ll find this blog post helpful in fixing some of the common Shopify SEO issues. Likewise if you are also facing issue of getting enough traffic but your sales are not increasing then see out best tips to increase conversion rate.

Getting started with Shopify SEO? We got some good reads for you:

• Shopify SEO Checklist
• How to Optimize a Shopify Website for SEO
• Best Free Shopify SEO Apps & Tools

Facing other SEO issues in Shopify? Comment them down, and I will provide you with the solution. 😀

Thanks for reading.