Using Vendor field as category (i.e. artist name)

[PathoStudio]

Hello

I've been playing around with making my products appear as if they have two lines, by using the vendor feature.

For example, in the screenshot you can see that the product title is the artwork name, and the vendor is the artist name. Before this, I had a single line showing as 'Ophelia by John William Waterhouse'.

Would utilising the vendor function in this way have any negative impact on SEO? I would not want the artist name to be impacted by this.

[K_Br4]

Hi PathoStudio

Your source code only contains one occurrence of the artist's name with a tag "Vendor" and many where you say this is the author of the painting.

I doubt Google will mistakenly classify the artist as a vendor if that's what you mean.

Unless you use the same structure for Google Merchant Center submission, you are OK.

However, to be extra safe, you can always add a metafield with the author's name for the same purpose. You would need to add the metafield position in the theme in order for it to show the way you want it to. To make it quick, you can use a spreadsheet editor for copying the info from the Vendor's column into the new Metafield (Option #) column.

[PathoStudio]

Hi, thank you for your response.

I have only just begun experimenting with this function which is why the occurence of the artist's name tagged 'vendor' only appears once. I wanted to ensure there were no issues before proceeding.

I actually attempted to experiment with adding Metafield titled 'subtitle', but I had no luck in getting this to work. The metafield is in place and filled in as 'John William Waterhouse' for the Ophelia painting, but I cannot get it to appear in place of vendor on the collection page. I've looked up various codings online but none seem to work for me.

If you would happen to have the code that would make the 'subtitle' metafield appear in place of the 'vendor' field, that would be greatly appreciated.

My Google Merchant Center is synced to my Shopify shop, so my worry is that it will only sync the title data and not the vendor (or even subtitle) data. This would prevent the artist name from showing up Google Shopping, which would obviously be very detrimental.

[PathoStudio]

For those wondering, Shopify allows your product to have two titles, one for the Shopify product listing, and the other for SEO. On Shopify, in the 'Google & YouTube' app, make sure that the Product Title Preference is set to SEO.

So this means I can simply have 'Ophelia' as my Shopify product title, and 'John William Waterhouse' as the vendor, and then write a different product title in the 'search engine listing' section of my product page (i.e. 'Ophelia Print by John William Waterhouse') The former will be how it is displayed on my website, and the latter is how it will be synced to Google.

My only slight concern is that in my analytics, Google takes information inputted to 'vendor' and translates it to 'brand'. I'm not sure if this would have any adverse effect, but that means it will recognise 'John William Waterhouse' as the brand instead of 'Pathos Studio', which is my business name.

[PathoStudio]

I was able to solve this thanks to the third party app, Multifeeds. Instead of 'vendor' being attributed to 'brand', I was able to simply default 'Pathos Studio' as brand.