Duplicate Page Content - Shopify

[farmiloe]

Moz reports that there are 1,600+ pages on my site (Sportiqe.com) that qualify as Duplicate Page Content. The website sells licensed apparel, causing shirts to go into multiple categories (ie - LA Lakers shirts would be categorized in three areas: Men's Shirts, LA Lakers Shirts and NBA Shirts)It looks like "tags" are the primary cause behind the duplicate content issues: // Collection Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts (Preferred URL): http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag): http://sportiqe.com/collections/la-clippers-shirts/la-clippers (URL w/ tag, w/o the www.): http://sportiqe.com/collections/all-products/clippers (Different collection, w/ tag and same content)// Blog Tags_Example: : http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/7902801-dispatch-is-back: http://www.sportiqe.com/blogs/sportiqe/tagged/elias-fundWould it make sense to do 301 redirects for the collection tags and use the Parameter Tool in Webmaster Tools to exclude blog post tags from their crawl? Or, is there a possible solution with the rel=cannonical tag?Appreciate any insight from fellow Shopify users and the Moz community.

[Chris.Menke]

Brett, this looks like the perfect application for rel=canonical--and in your description of the item be sure to use vocabulary that deals with all three of the categories.

[BeytzNet]

Hi Brett,

I'm new to Shopify and still playing with it. While I agree with Chris here, I believe that you may have organized your products / product collections badly on Shopify. Ideally, the links will always take you to the same location. Having the same product on many different URLs (even with canonical) is not a good solution.

http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/sportiqe-apparel/products/new-york-shirt-metro-collection
http://www.sportiqe.com/collections/mens-shirts/products/new-york-shirt-metro-collection 

[farmiloe]

What's your store URL, and how would you suggest we categorize our shirts?

It's typical for apparel companies to have a shirt that fits into a gender category, as well as a collection category.

[farmiloe]

Chris, taking your advice I added this code into my Shopify theme:

{% if template == 'product' %}{% if collection %}

{% endif %}{% endif %}

This code was added July 9th, exactly two weeks ago and I haven't seen the Duplicate Content issue decrease at all according to the Moz Campaign tools. Does it typically take this long to see an impact?

Should I reconsider doing 301 redirects for all my t-shirt collections? Thanks for your advice. (If useful, I also found this article discussing duplicate content on Shopify with a rel=canonical solution.)

[Chris.Menke]

From the issue you described, the rel=canonical is still the right choice.

According to Moz Documentation on Fixing Crawl DIagnostic Issues: "Keep in mind that that canonicals will stop the pages from ranking against each other, but they will still show up as duplicate content from a UI perspective, so we will still count them as duplicate."

Also from Moz documentation on How does Rogerbot calculate duplicate content?: "Two documents are considered duplicates if they have a 95% overlap. Furthermore, we should not count duplicates across pages that specify one or the other as the canonical version. The canonical version should not recognize the other as a duplicate, and the other version should not recognize the canonical as a duplicate."

[farmiloe]

Thanks Chris! I'm hoping that the issue falls under the Fixing Crawl Diagnostic Issues, in which case it sounds like there is no issue. But the Rogerbot answer confuses me, because Roger shouldn't count the canonical version of the page as duplicate content (which is the case)?

[Chris.Menke]

according to these, they will always show as duplicate in the report (but won't count against you in your search engine results).

[farmiloe]

Thanks again for your help Chris!

[BeytzNet]

Hi,

As I mentioned I'm still playing with it.
But as far as I can see, BigCommerce has a better solution (or at least handle the URLs better).

Without getting into my store, I also have on my site many "collections" - special offers, recommended, etc etc.

The link to the product page is always the same link. It doesn't make sense to link to "store.com/special-offers/product" and then canonical it to "store.com/product"

Which is what Shopify does... After discussing with them on those matters the answers were that everything can be changed but it might be complicated.

[samnaim]

Hello Chris,

I saw that Brett added rel="canonical" to his product template in shopify but wouldn't that tell Google not to look at all the products now? (ignore them) What if you want the images and the content of your product pages indexed by Google and showing up in results?

Thank you!