Canonical tag removal when Noindex tag applied

Hello,

I am using SEO Manager by venntov (https://apps.shopify.com/seo-meta-manager) to apply meta Noindex across Collections and Tags.

What I want to confirm :

  1. Is it possible to remove the canonical tag when the Noindex meta (using SEO Manager apps) is applied to products, collections, or tags? since this app inject javascript code to .

this is very easy to do if you use Yoast! on WordPress

  • Tags should only show up as parameter URLs (?, &etc) not as static URLs (/collections/tags1, /collections/tags2 etc). Is there a best practice to avoid duplicated content because tags appear in almost all collections where our products have added tags (to filter the collections)

can someone explain this to me? I am new to Shopify environment, especially on SEO Shopify optimization

best regards,

I’m not clear on the order of process here, but if the app is loading javascript then modifying the DOM there’s no reason you cannot also do the same after it finishes.

You’d run this immediately after or have a timeout checking for the elements or attributes the app creates to trigger your logic.

Product Tags for collection tag filtering urls are not url parameters in the normal since; just think of them as subdirectories :shrug:,

These tags are blocked by default in robots.txt specifically to avoid duplicate content i.e. collections/red+green == collections/green+red.

May want to review Googles Javascript SEO basics https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/javascript/javascript-seo-basics

FYI: shopify stores can now edit the robots text https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/editing-robots-txt , exercise caution especially if you do not know shopifys url structures.

Hi @PaulNewton ,

Thank you for the clear information here. for :

  • Product Tags for collection tag filtering URLs are not URL parameters in the normal since; just think of them as subdirectories :shrug:,

    These tags are blocked by default in robots.txt specifically to avoid duplicate content i.e. collections/red+green == collections/green+red → of course this tag will be flag as not crawl by Googlebot but what if we only want to exclude specific Product Tags on the first level i.e. collections/a/tags, collections/b/tags, collections/c/tags, etc. This kind url also duplicated on collections/all/tags, collections/all-collections/tags

Thank you

You’d need to to decide what is canonical and code it to be canonical, or work on robots.txt ,etc

Hi @PaulNewton

Any Shopify developer documentation regarding canonical tag?

Starting points

https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/canonical-urls

https://shopify.dev/api/liquid/objects#canonical_url

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/editing-robots-txt

https://shopify.dev/themes/seo/robots-txt

Despite what Google say modifying content with client side JavaScript is - at best, a very unreliable method for proper indexing. There are several problems …

  • Google do not execute JavaScript at the same time as crawling, so at first the page will get indexed without the JS modified content
  • Google may not execute the JavaScript at all - they give no guarantee they ever will and if they do not none of the content modified with JS will ever be indexed
  • Not all search engines execute JavaScript at all

The fact is that it is much safer, faster and reliable to render all content you want indexed on the server.

Personally I always advice my clients to implement SEO-strategies that works all the time. Getting client side JS indexed do not.

1 Like