Hey @lloydy14 ,
If I understand correctly, you want to canonicalize your product-only URLs to your collection-aware URLs?
Current:
collection-aware URL: /collections/foam-rollers/products/foam-roller-set
product-only URL: /products/foam-roller-set
canonical: /products/foam-roller-set
You want:
collection-aware URL: /collections/foam-rollers/products/foam-roller-set
canonical: /collections/foam-rollers/products/foam-roller-set
AND
product-only URL: /products/foam-roller-set
canonical: /products/foam-roller-set
Do I understand that correctly?
In short, you can't natively nor would I recommend this approach as it could really hurt your SEO. Here are a few reasons why off the top of my head and in no particular order:
- Many themes are moving away from the collection-aware URL entirely because it's not great for SEO for the reasons above.
- A product can belong to any number of collections, but only one product URL. So let's say your product is in the collection for /foam-rollers and in the collection for /equipment. The only difference between these two pages is the URL. Then Google has to decide which of those exact same pages will rank because they are both the canonical. Or, Google will say you've chosen /foam-rollers as the canonical but you get more traffic to /exercise and they choose your /exercise as the canonical.
- You may then run into Google Page Index reporting issues for "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" and "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical".
- The canonical to your product-only URL is to prevent duplicate content issues. If every collection-aware URL is self-canonicalized then you'd have the same content on multiple pages. You're telling Google these are all important but the content is identical, leading you to compete with yourself.
- Shopify automatically canonicalizes your collection-aware URLs to product-only URLs. The canonical URL is determined by Shopify and is configured for you. Though you could change the code to remove the canonical, you'd then have to add new code and build out how you'd want it to work which leaves a lot of room for error. Doing this wrong could be detrimental to your SEO.
- If you wanted your product-only URL to canonicalize to your collectin-aware URL (so reverse of the default in Shopify), all the above still applies.
- If you use any sort of third-party advertising (Google Ads, Youtube, Facebook, etc) they all use your product-only URL and variant-specific URL if appropriate. This could cause even more confusion with Google Search let alone Google Ads and Merchant Center. Not to mention you wouldn't be able to change the URLs for these third-party tools to your collection-aware URL.
Hopefully this helps.
Ilana Davis, Shopify SuperheroJSON-LD for SEO, adds structured data to your theme, getting you more organic traffic with Rich Results.
