HELP - Changing H1 - Title, Description, Canonical, Meta, Breadcrumbs based on Category Label Tags

[DEATHGROUND]

Hi there, 

I wonder if someone can help, or wants to offer me their services to adjust something I am struggling to do myself.

We are trying to avoid cannibalisation of collection topics and would rather have fewer collections, but many long tail variations based on adjusted/conditional liquid from the tags.

Our tags are category label tags as we are using Empire theme. 

This means they look like this: Type Of Car_Hatchback.

This means the url in the searchbar becomes domain.com/collections/cars/type-of-car_hatchback 

Ugly right?

We would like help with the following:

1. The search bar URL changes to domain.com/collections/cars/hatchback

2. The breadcrumb changes. We already use metafields to edit ours, but some understanding of how we can do that with this process, to put the main collection in the breadcrumbs and then a label for this tag.

3. Change the H1 and Description

4. We know this step, that's using SEO Manager to change the meta and meta desc for a tag.

5. Making this tagged page the canonical for this topic as we likely have some old collections that cover this topic that we will delete and redirect, but we want the tagged url to be a canonical of the long tail topic.

6. There is no 6.

My site, isn't domain.com nor is it about cars, they were just examples, but I am struggling with how to do this and also in a way that doesn't cause the site to crawl to a stop with overload of loops and more. We probably have about 5 or 6 collections we want to do this with, and currently, our tag filters are ajax and no indexed. Which is what many of my other collections will need to remain as to avoid those creating duplicates and causing issues.

If anyone knows the solution, or wants to offer their services and is available right away, let me know

[KieranR]

A simple solution to the crawl loops without changing too much with what you have would be to no-follow the tag sibling links. 

An alternative approach (my personal preference) is to hack in sub-categories via normal collections pages instead of the approach you've detailed (hacking them in via tags).

Then you can setup a metafield on collections for "parent_collection" and one for "list_child_collections". 

This lets you do:

• Internal linking with collection-named anchors is more easily scaleable.
• Meta-names & descs are editable, exportable and importable without an app like SEO Manager
• You have more robust control of what products are in a collection than simply has/has no tag logic.
• Collection URLs are in the sitemap.
• Easier to avoid flakey crawl paths and loops with tag+tag+tag.
• Easier to static gen a collection page rather than a collection page with tags, better for internal link/topic equity through to PDPs. 
• Can get the sibling pages via liquid calling the children of parent - for links like: "See also: sedans, wagons, pickups, vans"
• Can get the parent pages via liquid - for links like: "See all Cars" can also use for breadcrumbs.
• No canonical URL headaches, by self-canonicalising some tag pages.

Cons: 

• Different URL path not domain.com/collections/cars/hatchback but if you really want that URL keyword domain.com/collections/hatchback-cars is not hard to do.
• Breadcrumbs in JSON-LD are still tricky.

[DEATHGROUND]

Thanks for replying.

The reason we wanted the URL as the first instance is the potential for
stronger page value. If the collection is simply a tagged version of a
senior page, it would seem logical (though not necessarily that simple)
that we would have a better shot of ranking for the long tail.

We do have meta breadcrumbs to create a hierarchy right now, and we have
set tags to no follow for filters, but we are conscious they are
canonicalised to the present page they are on and all of this is just
guidance that Google can choose to ignore.

Is this something you have done for others in the past?

Struggling to find anyone who can get their head round it, or understands
the SEO perspective to grasp what we are trying to achieve.

[KieranR]

I undid a setup similar to what you're suggesting, yeah I get what you mean. 

Shouldn't be too hard to find some conditional liquid tags to do what you need to sort out the canonicals. 

URL's are trickier to make "clean" as Shopify doesn't give you any URL routing or naming control. But there is an advanced way via CloudFlare O2O and Workers to achieve this.