Hello @cjhinkle
You’re definitely on the right track asking about canonical tags — they’re crucial for SEO to avoid duplicate content issues.
Here’s a full breakdown based on what you shared:
Understanding the Issue
You’re using the Dawn theme and have a canonical tag showing like this:
But tools like SEOptimer are saying “no canonical tag found”. The Shopify bot suggested using:
Yet the rendered output does show a canonical tag, so what’s going wrong?
Key Problems to Check
- Typographic Quotation Marks (Copy-Paste Issue)
Your output shows:
That’s a curly quote ” instead of a proper straight double quote "
. It must be:
Curly quotes can break HTML parsing or confuse SEO tools like SEOptimer.
2 . Where Should Canonical Be Placed?
In Shopify Dawn, you don’t need to manually insert the canonical tag — it’s automatically included if you’re using:
{{ content_for_header }}
Which is standard in Dawn in theme.liquid:
...
{{ content_for_header }}
So if you already have {{ content_for_header }}, the canonical tag will be injected by Shopify automatically using the current URL logic.
You can confirm by doing:
. Right-click > View Source on your live site (not Inspect Element).
. Search for rel=“canonical” and confirm it has the correct domain and URL.
Best Practices / Fixes
If {{ content_for_header }} is present:
. Do not add your own <link rel=“canonical”…> manually unless you want to override Shopify’s logic.
. Just fix any custom code where curly quotes might be messing it up.
If you’re overriding it on purpose:
Make sure your code in theme.liquid looks like this:
Not this:
Tip: Always type quotes manually in your code editor to avoid Word-style smart quotes.
Thank you 
