Fix Shopify Product Links from Collections for SEO

It’s undeniable, Shopify is easily the best ecommerce platform out there now for most businesses and use-cases, outside of a few exceptions.

But it does have it’s flaws, especially from an SEO perspective, some of which boggle the brain as I can’t understand why they exist. One of these is the links Shopify creates to products from collection pages as users navigate.

Here’s what I mean:

A normal product URL on Shopify looks like this:

https://website.com/products/fluffy-white

But they turn into this on Shopify collection pages:

https://website.com/collections/bobble-hats/products/fluffy-white

WHY? I’ll never understand it.

Product pages do have canonicals, but this isn’t a great solution…

Canonical Tags

Google uses canonicals as a recommendation only, and in my experience they do ignore them occasionally. For many of my Shopify clients in the past I have seen both impressions and clicks in Search Console from these URLs.

What’s worse is sometimes I have seen this for both versions of the URL.

And that isn’t the only issue with these links…

Crawl Budgets

Every website has a different crawl budget, decided upon by a number of factors including links to the website, website size, update frequency, etc.

As Google crawls your website it follows all of the links it finds, including all of these useless ones which are canonicalised and unwanted in Google’s index, so there’s no point in having them followed or discovered in the first place.

So let’s go ahead and remove them completely.

How to Fix These Shopify Collection Links

There’s quite a simple fix for this by modifying a small piece of code within your Shopify template, even for those with little to no coding knowledge.

Here’s how:

Navigate to Online Store > Themes

Click on the 3 dots beneath your current theme, next to the Customize button.

Now click on Edit Code

In the top left Search Box on the Code Editor screen, enter this:

product-grid-item.liquid

If there are no results, search for something similar within the Snippets section of the Code Editor. The file names can vary from theme to theme.

Once you’ve found the correct file, search for the following:

{{ product.url | within: collection }}

And replace it with:

{{ product.url }}

Click Save and you’re done. Head to a collection to check it worked.

Hopefully that helped you out!