Collections vs. Products Not Passing Link Value

[JamesDarkHorse]

The way that Shopify structures a website means that a product page can have several different URLs. 

If you manage this properly, using a canonical tag, then different URLs for different collections all have a canonical tag pointing to the single product URL, right? This means that Google will only rank one version and manages the duplicate content issue of having say 5 versions of the same page. 

However, imagine you get an amazing link from a highly relevant and quality website to your products, but they used a collections URL instead of the product URL (so a non-indexable, non-canonical URL) when they added the link. The SEO value of that link is considered to be only partially passed on, and we are told this is about 10% of the link value. 

So can I not feature my products in multiple collections but always use the one product URL and remove/redirect the other additional collections URLs I had for that page?

I'm told this would be very difficult and take a huge amount of resources to do. Can you help?

[YvonRamazani]

hmm can you reformulate this part :

"So can I not feature my products in multiple collections but always use the one product URL and remove/redirect the other additional collections URLs I had for that page?

I'm told this would be very difficult and take a huge amount of resources to do. Can you help?"

from what I understand there is a link equity issue as you've received 1 backlink to a collection page with a noindex tag right ? 

so now you want to know if you can set up your product in several collections, is that right ?

[cwordswo]

Yes, I agree with you, these repetitive pages do not pass SEO value, you can modify your theme to redirect the collection + product page to the product page (without /collection/), many Shopify theme creators have noted this problem, and they structure their themes like this by default. You can also confirm with Shopify support which is the noncanonical URL and which is the repetitive URL, and which URL should you build links to, the support staff does not have enough expertise to answer this question, you would have to ignore their responses, and ask them to pass the ticket to the expert team.