Duplicate content in Shopify - subsequent pages in collections

[ycnetpro101]

Hello everyone!

I hope an expert in this community can help me verify the canonical codes I'll add to our store is correct.

Currently, in our Shopify store, the subsequent pages in the collections are not indexed by Google, however the canonical URL on these pages aren't pointing to the main collection page (page 1), e.g. The canonical URL of page 2, page 3 etc are used as canonical URLs instead of the first page of the collections.

I have the canonical codes attached below, it would be much appreciated if an expert can urgently verify these codes are good to use and will solve the above issues? Thanks so much for your kind help in advance!!

-----------------CODES BELOW---------------

<title><br /> {{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
{% if page_description %}

{% endif %}

{% if current_page != 1 %}

{% else %}

{% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %}
{% if current_page == 1 %}

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

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

{% endif %}

[effectdigital]

Your code looks as if you have more than one canonical tag deployed on a single web-page, so that would be a bad deployment. One page can only have one canonical parent and that's that

It seems that you are attempting to use canonical tags to address pagination (paginated content, e.g: site.com/collection/page-2/ or site.com/collection?p=2) on your collection URLs, is that right?

Don't use canonical tags to address pagination. A paginated URL is canonical for the specified 'page' of content, which may (under some rare circumstances) be more useful to search users. Do not de-index your paginated content by making those paginated URLs canonical elsewhere

Instead, use Google's rel=prev/next guidance as outlined here.

If you de-index paginated URLs by using canonical tags, the rankings that some of those paginated URLs (due to their unique comments or tabbed content) may have gained, will not usually be given to the canonical parent. Although you will have more control over the user-journey, you will lose out on some long-tail traffic

Instead use rel=prev/next which will tell Google that the content is a  subsequent 'page' of another document. This will make the paginated URLs 'less' likely to rank, but will allow them to rank for very specific search queries. Then you have the best of both worlds

Some people think that, prev/next and canonical are actually compatible. I am a little uneasy with regards to that, but if you do decide to utilise canonical tags to force one page to rank more often - don't deploy them without rel-prev/next

Hope that helps!

[karenvg]

Hi, I came across this page because I have the same question about page 2 of collection pages.  In my case, the URL for page 2 of a collection would be site.com/collection?p=2,  with the canonical tag for the page also pointing to site.com/collection?p=2.

I am concerned that this will create duplicate content, because the collection description is repeated on each page of the collection.

Is your advice still current?  The link in your response no longer exists, and according to webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html, Rel=prev/next is not an indexing signal anymore.

Thanks!

[effectdigital]

The advice is no longer current. If you want to see what Google used to say about rel=next/prev, you can read that on this archived URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20190217083902/https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

As you say Google are no longer using rel=prev/next as an indexation signal. Don't take that to mean that, Google are now suddenly blind to paginated content. It probably just means that their base-crawler is now advanced enough, not to require in-code prompting

I still don't think that de-indexing all your paginated content with canonical tags is a good idea. What if, for some reason, the paginated version of a parent URL is more useful to end-users? Should you disallow Google from ranking that content appropriately, by using canonical tags (remember: a page that uses a canonical tag cites itself as non-canonical, making it unlikely that it could be indexed)

Google may not find the parent URL as useful as the paginated variant which they might otherwise rank, so using canonical tags in this way could potentially reduce your number of rankings or ranking URLs. The effect is likely to be very slight, but personally I would not recommend de-indexation of paginated content via canonical tags (unless you are using some really weird architecture that you don't believe Google would recognise as pagination). The parameter based syntax of "?p=" or "&p=" is widely adopted, Google should be smart enough to think around this

If Search Console starts warning you of content duplication, maybe consider canonical deployment. Until such a time, it's not really worth it