Shopify Markets US & Canada Duplicate Content Issue

[PeterDavis22]

Hello, 

I originally thought it was a good idea to do the Shopify Markets and create a subfolder (pretty sure I'm wrong now) and have my Canadian market as my primary domain and then a subfolder of /us-en. I realized that create a huge issue with our duplicate content and am now trying to revert my mess that I created with switching it back to just primary domain. 

This has created a big issue with our SEO and now I'm trying to figure out a way to remove the en-us to help google realize that we only had one domain and remove the duplicate content. Do you have any ideas on how I can do that? Would I need to create a URL redirect for each linbk? Is there an easy way to do that?

[justtall]

Hello!

Who told you subfolders are a huge issue for seo? Shopify automatically creates hreflang tags on their back end for each country and language connected to each subfolder.

We use us, eu and ca subfolders and it has been a dream to see customers automatically land on the correct subfolder based on their location and therefore see their correct currency. All without any app.

And every single subfolder has been indexed by Google successfully.

[SEOProStaff]

Hi @PeterDavis22 ,

Tackling duplicate content due to market-specific subfolders like '/us-en' can indeed affect SEO. One strategy is to ensure that Google properly indexes these versions by using 'hreflang' tags, which Shopify automatically generates for different regions and languages. This helps direct users to the correct version of your site based on their location, mitigating duplicate content issues.

In addition to Shopify's built-in features, SEOPro can further assist by optimizing your SEO setup. It conducts audits to identify and fix SEO issues, potentially mitigating the impact of having multiple market-specific subfolders. SEOPro provides tools for bulk optimization, including meta titles and descriptions, which can be crucial in managing content across different markets efficiently.

Full disclosure: We are the developer of this app.

[Niko8]

Hi Phil, could we have a chat about your proposal, for how to overcome SEO issues caused from the Shopify Markets , with a matrix not SEO optimized due to the constrain that Shopify is applying on Primary markets, and so to the HREFLANG structure. I have sent a message to from the App dashboard from shopify app store. Best Regards Niko Greekflavours.

[joshuaboileau]

Hi @SEOProStaff ,

We have experienced the exact same issue. We used subfolders to allow international markets to see their own URL structure and allow for their appropriate currency to appear (USA = /en-us/ and in $$USD$$. What happened was that the products are appearing in Google Shopping for those URLs with incorrect images and image sizes. It's as if the images were pulled from our website but with no rhyme or reason. 

Note: we use Flexify for our product superfeed and use our omnichannel partner for our local inventory feed.

I've reverted the Shopify Markets > langage/domain subfolder option for now and waiting on Google to crawl to remove this mess.

[MrKOYO]

hi @PeterDavis22  , did you find a solution?