When it comes to SEO, duplicate content is one of the most pressing issues Shopify has created. When two URLs contain the same or similar content, it is considered duplicate content. The problem is that search engines might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be considered the canonical version. In addition, many times link signals are split between pages.

The following are some examples of how Shopify creates duplicate content:

1. Product pages with duplicate content
2. Duplicate collections pages as a result of pagination

This problem is created by Shopify within their product pages. Shopify stores can render their /products/ pages at two separate URL paths by default:

• Canonical URL Path: /products/
• Non-canonical URL Path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify addresses this issue by ensuring that all collections/.*/products/ pages contain a canonical link to the corresponding products/ page. Observe how the URL in the address differs from the "canonical" field.

While this certainly helps Google consolidate duplicate content, the internal linking structure presents a more alarming issue. Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages by default.

Furthermore, we have seen Shopify link to non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize "swatch" internal links that point to other color variants.

As a result, Shopify builds your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority search engine optimization problem, since the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

1. Here are the pages we link to internally the most often.

2. However, the URLs that we link to most often do not correspond to those we wish to rank in Google.

In general, canonical tags are respected, but Google treats them as hints rather than directives. This means that you're relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not a page is duplicated each time it crawls it. It is better not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this that requires adjusting the product.grid-item.liquid file.

Several Shopify sites have also been observed to duplicate content due to the site's pagination. More specifically, the first collection page of a particular series is duplicated. Once you are on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain "?page=1"

However, this will almost always result in a duplicate page. A URL with "?page=1" will almost always contain the same content as the non-parameterized URL unless additional actions are taken. This again can be remedied through a modification to the liquid files.

It is Shopify's default setting to generate a robots.txt file for your store with a number of prewritten "Disallow" commands. In most cases, Shopify's default robots.txt rules are sufficient for most store owners.

The following areas of the website will not be crawled by Shopify:

• Admin area
• Checkout
• Orders
• Shopping cart
• Internal search
• Policies page

It is possible, however, that you may need to adjust the robots.txt file as Shopify stores become larger and more customized. The good news is that Shopify now offers the ability to update the robots.txt file as of June 2021.

The store owner must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes in the Shopify robots.txt file.

The following steps can be followed by store owners to create a robots.txt.liquid file:

1. Login to your Shopify admin
2. In the left navigation, navigate to Online Store > Themes
3. Choose Actions > Edit code
4. In "Templates", click on the "Add a new template" option
5. In the left dropdown, choose "robots.txt"
6. Choose "Create template"

This should create the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. By adding liquid code to your robots.txt.liquid file, you can then add rules. It is not difficult to add this code, and Shopify does a good job of explaining how to do it in their official documentation. These steps should allow you to have much greater control over which URLs are crawled by Shopify.

Shopify automatically generates a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path "domain.com/sitemap.xml". Accordingly, Shopify's sitemap.xml index file will automatically link to child sitemaps containing URLs of the following page types:

• Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
• Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
• Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
• Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

The sitemap.xml file will be dynamically updated as new pages are added or removed from the site. In general, the Shopify sitemap.xml is ready to use out of the box and does not require any modifications.

It is important to be aware that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The major problem we see is the inclusion of pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site in the sitemap.xml file. The purpose of crawling your sitemap.xml is to identify instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.

The Shopify platform allows you to use redirects out-of-the-box, which is terrific. It can be used to consolidate old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You may do so by visiting the following location in the Shopify admin area:

• Online Store
• Navigation
• URL Redirects

It is important to remember that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. As a result, you must be certain that you will not be using the page in the future.

To import redirects in bulk, we recommend Matrixify.

In general, Shopify does a good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes include "Product" markup, which provides Google with key information about your product, such as its name, description, price, etc. Most themes take care of this for you, since structured data is probably the most important element of any e-commerce site.

It would be beneficial for Shopify sites to add structured data to collections pages as well. To accomplish this, it is necessary to add the Product structured data to each individual product link in the product listing page.

In addition, if you plan to use Shopify's blog functionality, you should use the "Article" structured data type. This is a great schema type that tells Google that your blog content is editorial in nature. Of all informational content schema, "Article" seems to be the one that Google may prefer since it is mentioned in their official documentation. The "BlogPosting" schema is also a type of structured data that can be added to your Shopify blog.

We regularly add breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data to Shopify sites. Having breadcrumbs on an e-commerce website is vital, since they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they are within a site's hierarchy. These breadcrumbs can also assist Google in understanding how the website is structured. In general, we recommend adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking them up with BreadcrumbList structured data in order to assist Google in understanding those internal links.

Having a developer on hand can be helpful if you wish to implement structured data. This will ensure that your site will always have these schema elements.

If your development resources are limited, we recommend Schema App Total Schema Markup. Structured data types, such as Product and BlogPosting schema, will be incorporated on the appropriate webpages of the site. Additionally, OfferCatalog schema will be added to every product within a category page.

We hear a lot of complaints about Shopify's slow loading times. However, in comparison with other e-commerce platforms, Shopify performs quite well. As a default feature, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching, which gives you a solid performance foundation.

Below are the things we will generally advise our clients to do in order to improve performance:

• Lazy load images
• Automatically compress images
• Eliminate any unnecessary Shopify apps
• Manually resize and compress large images
• Migrate tracking scripts to Google Tag Manager