is venture theme already ready for canonical and the suggested code from semrush is redundant?
Yes, venture theme comes with default canonical line in the <head>. Every Shopify theme I've seen does too. The SEMrush blog you read about canonical tags sounds generic and not specific to your website or situation.
- Find {{ product.url | within: collection }}
- Replace with {{ product.url }}
- I understood that the effect is that if you click on product, you will be redirected to the .../products/productname url instead of having the collection added to the URL.
- Can anyone tell me if this is helpful for SEO?
- Side effect is that my breadcrumps got useless... i am not sure if i am happy with this. Does anyone have an opinion on this?
Opinions vary here - there are a few things to consider.
- Technically you are not "redirected" as in 301 redirected. You are changing the /collections/ template and changing where the internal links point directly. But yes, you are changing internal links on all collections page types to point directly to the "root" .../products/product-name page.
- It can be helpful for SEO, you could argue that an internal link is a much stronger indicator of primary page over canonicalisation.
- Some people will say that canonicalising in itself is enough - however in my personal experience I've found multiple instances of dupe canonical pages competing with the root product page (cannibalisation) - my guess here is simply that google ignores the default canonicalisation setup and does sometimes rank canonicalized pages anway.
- Yep if you do this breadcrumbs are useless. Because Shopify doesn't have a concept of a "primary category" per product there is no real way to breadcrumb.
An alternative approach I quite like is to set a "primary" category per product via metafields, then build this into collections pages so each product page only has one URL under a primary category, and breadcrumbs still work, bit complex to get it right but can work well.
As a short answer though, yeah I generally prefer replacing the default with {{ product.url }} and flattening out the site structure and more clearly pointing link equity towards the primary product page.
