Product Tag Pages - Shopify

[farmiloe]

My website is Sportiqe.com. We sell t-shirts and use Shopify.

We're finding that Google is assigning a higher than normal (normal being "1") page authority ranking on our product tag pages (ie - Products Tagged "knicks").

Would it make sense to do 301 redirects for these product tag pages to the Product pages we want to rank for? (ie - would we do a 301 redirect for a page called "Products Tagged 'Knicks'" to our "New York Knicks Shirts" page?)

OR

Would it make sense to change these Product Tag Page titles to another key term to have multiple search results (assuming that ordering the products in a different way would eliminate any Duplicate Page Content issues?) For example, renaming the page title from "Products Tagged Knicks" to "TAG NAME | Sportiqe Apparel"

Appreciate any insight from the Moz community, Shopify store managers and fellow t-shirt enthusiasts.

[Saijo.George]

Personally I would 301 the tag page "Products Tagged 'Knicks'" to the "New York Knicks Shirts" collections page . The only issue I can think of is that , will the collections be updated over time to add all the new items that might be potentially tagged as Knicks ?

So perhaps it might be better to keep the tag page for Knicks as the go to page for " Knicks TShirts ". You can edit the tag template to add custom banners and descriptions and I would also change the h1 tag on the tag page to say something more relevant than just " PRODUCTS "

[Everett]

My first choice would be to stop using the tags altogether. If you need a few for legitimate sub-categories then you can just limit it to those few, but otherwise it's just a mess. You can read about how to remove tags on this Shopify help page. Any tag page that had external links (probably very few, if any) should get 301 redirected if you do this.

You could also choose to noindex,follow or robots.txt block the /all/ folder to keep those pages from being indexed if you want to leave them up for visitors (do they 'really' use them?).

Google is probably assigning value to those pages because of your internal links, which appear on every product page. It would be better to link to categories and other products instead, thus sending pagerank where you want it to go.

You could leave the links up and redirect the tag pages, as per your original question, but I feel that would be addressing the symptom (PR going into tag pages) rather than the cause (links to tag pages on the site).

Good luck!

[farmiloe]

Thanks for the thoughtful advice Everett! I went into Shopify as you suggested and discovered that not only could you hide all tags from product pages (without deleting them, which is important because this is how our products are categorized on the backend), but you could display the collections a particular t-shirt belongs to instead of the product tags.

See here for an example of a t-shirt with collections displayed instead of product tags.

If I'm understanding the power of internal links, this should help increase the pagerank for our t-shirt collections (which is where we ultimately want to drive people).

A couple of follow up questions...

1. Should we now redirect tag pages to relevant collections so the PR transfers? (ie - redirect the "knicks" tag to the New York Knicks T-Shirts page?)

2. Or, should we add no follow tags to all of our product tag pages?

3. Should we include the collections links on our product pages? Or are we running the risk of having too many links on a page?

Thanks again for your insight and help.

[Everett]

1. If the tag page has one or more external links then you should redirect it to send that pagerank to the collections page. Otherwise it's probably not worth the effort.

2. You shouldn't add a "no follow" tag to the product tag pages, but you should add a "no index" tag. Preferably it would be "noindex, follow".

3. Yes you should include the collections links on your product pages. If you have too many links on a page there are other less important links to get rid of.

Also, since you're going to be sending pagerank into category pages (i.e. collection pages) you should look into putting a short, unique, helpful category description on those pages. You'd be amazed at how much this helps category pages rank for short and mid-tail keywords if you get just a couple of decent external links to them too.

[farmiloe]

Everett, thank you so much for your advice and assistance.

Please email bfarmiloe@sportiqe.com with your t-shirt size, mailing address and any particular shirt you like at Sportiqe.com and I'll make sure that we send something your way as a thank you.

Enjoy the weekend.