Guys, welcome to another video in the training series for Shopify x SEO. In this video, we're going to work through a pretty common problem with e commerce stores in general. And that issue where platforms create duplicate content issues. Now, there are a number of reasons this happens with ecommerce stores. But a lot of the time, it's due to issues where let's say you have a product. And it has a number of different variations such as color or size.

And some platforms when the actual when you click between those different sizes, or you add them to your cart, or add them to the product page and update, it'll actually create a new URL. And Google if they're not set correctly, Google will actually see those as a different URL. But you have essentially the same content on the page. Any any page that Any website that has duplicate content, so you have identical content on multiple pages of your site, or indeed, duplicate content on another site. There's risk of suppression and penalties. And the obviously the main one with that is, it's called panda.

Okay, so let's go and have a look now in real terms how duplicate content can happen on an e commerce store, and we'll bring over here poorly optimized toy store. Okay, so it mainly happens with, as I mentioned, variants on product pages, but also on category pages, and for a number of different reasons. So, okay, we're just going to go to a collection page. And here we've had a collection page load up and if you have If you have your content in your description here, and from the the collection page video, you would understand that we want 100 or 200 words of content here just briefly explaining what the the actual collection is. And then we would generally have a large block of content here at the bottom under the collection or under the product grids. So then you can see we've got this page one and page two, and what that is, is pagination.

So keep in mind, we've got this content here. And this is the way a lot of ecommerce stores, but also Shopify is set up. So we're scrolling down. And if we click page two, we can see that the URL, go to a different URL now. So if that's readable by Google, it'll index in Google as page two. And then you can see here the country In the description is also on page two, as you see the collection page title and all the other SEO metadata that's in the page.

And we've got different products here because they're there on the pagination on page two. And then obviously, if we had the extra content down the bottom here, it had been the same. So we end up duplicating a portion of this collection page with the title and the content here in the content at the bottom. So if that, let's say we had in this actual collection with hundreds of products that pagination could go to and say page 10 or pay your living. So all of a sudden, we've got multiple pages with identical content. And that for an e commerce store is really bad.

And that can create that duplicate content issue and the potential for a panda penalty or suppression. So that's one way that a commerce platform can create duplicate content if you're not careful. We'll look at another possibility. Okay, so we have a product page here. And we've got the URL at the top here. And we can just get rid of this for now.

And we'll just reload it. And we can see now we have the URL and get rid of that. And if we change the is it is very weird variation to veteran, we can see that the URL changes. And again, if that's a real URL in Google, I will change it again here. It will, if it's Google can read the page with that URL to be indexed in Google. Now, the Shopify a, originally they didn't have the option here but Shopify have fixed this.

So now with variants, and we don't have the duplicate content issue will explain in a second how that works. Okay, and then Another way that duplicate content can be created is by the use of tags. So when you add tags to your product pages, we'll just show you what I mean. So for that particular product, we can see here in the back end, we can add tags, Star Wars and action figure. And these tags are really good if you want to group you know, products together in a certain way. And they can be quite handy.

But if we, we just look at how tag can affect duplicate content. So here we have the Star Wars. just reload it and make sure it's correct. Again, we have the Star Wars collection. And we've got our title and our description and some content here. And then the products are in that collection.

So a tag page will actually append the, the tag on the end of that URL, and this is if not careful. It's also indexable in Google and we'll explain why later on. minute. So you can see here that it creates this duplicate content issue where you have the same title, description and content on this page as well. So there's three ways that duplicate content can be created. Now, otherwise, we're going to ensure that it's set up correctly.

So that doesn't happen. You can also there's also potential to create duplicate content with search URLs when you add a search into your search bar here. But that's not something we don't normally worry about too much. We haven't had too many issues with this search function creating duplicate content. So we'll just look at ways we can mitigate this with some of the features we can add in to Shopify. Okay, so we'll just talk about some of the tags that as Internet wide and common tags that can be used to mitigate these issues with duplicate content, not just ecommerce stores, but for websites in general.

So the first one is called a canonical canonical tag. canonical tag is it's a bit of code in the back end of a web page. And essentially, it tells Google that which page is the original page for a particular piece of content. Okay, so here's a product page. If we and we want this product page. So if we're going to going to have different variations, we want Google to know that this main URL is actually the original URL that we want Google to take note of, and any pages or URLs or variations.

We want Google to understand that there is an original page and that's the only one we want them to take note of, if that makes sense. So the way we can find out if we just go back to the original URL, and then we're gonna go look at the source code. So Right click and source code. And then we can go Ctrl F, and you start typing in canonical. And we'll see here is a canonical tag here. So this canonical tag tells Google that this URL is the only URL we want you to take note of when there are variations.

So now, if we add in a variation, we just reloaded it to make sure the variation is in you in the browser bar, we go to view page source. And we can see that the canonical of this page is set to the original, so Google knows not to take into account when valuing this page. The duplicate content of the variation is only used to take note of the original URL So this is a really critical part of any comm store that variations have the canonical tag set correctly. So Google knows what the original source of the product is. So within Shopify, this happens on a number of different levels. Let's say the user clicks through the menu and ends up on a collection page.

And then from the collection page, they click through to a product. And you can see here, now, the URL has a collection, slash, slash yet the collection name, then the product and then the product name. So if we then do a page source method, and we can see that the canonical is set to the original product, so two different URL than what was shown, but it's telling us or it's telling Google that the original page for this particular URL is this URL here. So if we click on that, it'll be the same product page. But it's a different URL. So then we only end up with eight for each product, we only end up with one URL for each product.

And we don't have that duplicate content issue. As mentioned before, the other way this can happen is with paginated pages. So here's the collection page if we go to the page source. And we can see that the canonical URL is actually the correct URL for the first page. If we get to page two, and we can see that it adds on the page equals two, which is a different URL has all the same content in the description. Now, if we look at the source code of this collection page, which has been paginated, we can see that the canonical is actually set to that page too.

So all of a sudden we've got duplicate content. So on the page two has the same content in terms of the description, and all the text here as page one. So canonical tags, one method in dealing with a duplicate content issue. And the other method is by now indexing the actual page itself. So what that essentially means is, when there's a no index tag on the page, it will encourage not not guarantee it will encourage Google to not index that page in the search engines. It's pretty rare that they'll index pages if you have a no index tag, but it is just a guideline for Google.

So that's just something you need to be aware of. And generally, we only know index pages that we definitely don't want to be in Google. So it's just a little bit of an extra piece of protection, I suppose. But you know, you got to be careful. You don't know index pages that you want people to find in the search engine results as well. So things that can be now indexed, like privacy policy policy pages, your shopping cart, etc, etc, that you don't need indexed in Google.

But we're going to use both these tags in our in the way we actually deal with the duplicate content issues. So we've been through collection, page pagination, tag pages, generally tag pages that are another issue with any website. And we generally like to no index tag pages. So same sort of issues, you can end up with duplicate content where you had tag pages with with the same content. So I'll just show you an example. So as I showed you these tag page before, what we would want to do is no index, these tag pages.

So we'll work through how we're going to do that now. Okay, so how do we actually do this in Shopify? So keeping with our theme of either a free method or a paid method, and the first one here By adding a bit of code to Shopify now seems for those who are not really used to working with code or seems a bit of gobbledygook. It's pretty simple. And it's pretty hard to make a mistake, but you just need to be aware how to do it and be careful with how you do it. So we're going to head on over now to our Shopify store.

And we will add in the code to and I'll explain what the code does and how it fixes the duplicate content issues. Okay, so here's this bit of code that we're going to use to add to our theme code, and the back end of Shopify, and what is code I'm looking to explain a little different elements of it. But what it will do, it will fix the duplicate content issue on our collection pages with a page and it will also no index out tag pages on whether a tag pages on a site. So the first thing you're going to do is in your theme, you'll Come to edit code. Then the file that we're going to edit is called theme liquid. And it'll bring you to this section here of theme, liquid.

Now, my themes, you'll be able to find this line of code here, where it's got link rel canonical. If it's not here, in the first few lines, just do the ctrl f method. And you can type in row equals colon and in canonical, and it'll show you where it is. So this is a line of code we're going to replace so all we're going to do is copy and paste over this code. So highlight that bit of code. Then we're going to get our code that we're going to replace it with.

So highlight and copy that bit of code. And then we're just going to paste it Ctrl V, and we're going to paste the code over the top. So that adds it in there, then we're going to click Save. And it's saved. And now we're going to go and have a look at our store. So we're just going to go back to the home page.

First thing we're gonna double check is that the the homepage is still set up, and it's indexable. So we'll click on source code, just to double check that we haven't made a mistake. And we can see straight away here we've got the canonical tag. So that's the correct canonical tag with which is the homepage. And to check that it is indexable. We're going to go Ctrl F, and you're just going to type in no index to make sure it's not anywhere on the page, and it's not.

So that's the first check. Now we're going to go to one of our collection pages. Going to go view page source again, we can see the canonical set correctly. And we're going to go now index again. And it's not there on our page. So now we're going to go to page two.

So this is a page that would be duplicate. If we hadn't set added the code, click view page source. And now we can see that the canonical is actually set to this page. But there is a no index follow tag in this section here. So what this is telling Google is we don't want Google to index this particular page. So even though the canonical is still there, because it won't be indexed.

It's not good. take it into account at all anyway, because it might be indexed in Google. And that would be the same if we go to, there's no more products, but we get to page three, page four, page five, etc. So it will continue on. So the collection pages are set up correctly now. And if we just go and look at another collection page to make sure that it's set up correctly.

So there's no pagination on here, but we want to make sure that it is indexable Ctrl, F and no index, so it's not there. So that's correct. Now we look at out one of our tag pages. So here's one of our tag pages, we just reload it. So we want this page to be now index because it's a tag page, view page source. And you can see there it is no index.

Just a bit of a disclaimer on the tag pages, it's up to you whether you want to know index tag pages or not, we found we get better results. By no indexing tag pages, it just sculpt the site a little bit clearer for Google. So it makes for better targets when we're actually doing it off page SEO later on. So that's why we do it, we seem to get better results that way. And we do it on most of our sites. So that's what I would recommend.

But it's up to you. Whether you do them or not. The pagination, I would certainly recommend that you, you add the pagination and no index to ensure that you've only got one, one page category page actually, actually indexable in Google. So the last little check we'll do is just make sure that the product pages themselves are actually still set up and haven't accidentally had the note index tag added to them. And is now it's indexable. And it's got the correct canonical set.

So that's fine. Okay, so now we will look at our paid method. And they've not paid. It's a pretty cheap one. But it is a monthly cost to use this app, but it's the cheapest one we've, we use. And it's really simple.

Okay, so it's called site map and now index manager. And you can just go and go to the Shopify App Store and install it on your store. And then we can go and actually configure it. So once you come to the dashboard, you can just use the menu items along the top here, and you can open them up and see what what you can index what you can no index, and how you set your canonical. So you can see here, this is a pagination, no index So you can just turn it on or off as simple as that. And that'll no index your paginated pages, you can see you can actually no index your your entire site, which you don't want to do.

You can no and it's search results if you want. Now index your cart page, and your login page. Then we go to products, we can, here we have the option for our tag pages. So you can now index your tag and filter pages. You can even no index your vendors, etc, etc. So you can go a little deeper with this.

But as I said, it is a paid, paid version. But even with this, this system or this app, I would still only recommend starting with the page and added pages and your tag pages, and then see how the site performs and you can actually change these as you as you go. But we find the paginated pages and tags are the only ones we need to deal with. When we're looking at actually Sitting and now indexing canonical text. Okay, so I hope that all makes sense, quite a critical part of setting up the structure of your site. And try not to be too discouraged by working with code.

If you're going to work on the free method. It's pretty hard to actually cause a problem. And if you get stuck, you generally can recover the code pretty well. But if you just very carefully copy and paste the code, you're not going to have too many problems. So we'll see you next video.