How to link products directly from collection pages for better SEO?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Goal: ensure product links from collection pages point directly to /products/product-name (not /collections/collection-name/products/product-name) to reduce redirects and potential crawl/link equity concerns.

Main approach (Liquid): replace links using the within filter. Change {{ product.url | within: collection }} to {{ product.url }} to remove collection context (or the reverse to add it). The within: collection filter appends the collection path to product URLs.

Where to edit (varies by theme): common files reported include Snippets: product-card-grid.liquid (Debut), product-grid-item.liquid (Supply/Brooklyn), product-thumbnail.liquid (Parallax/Turbo), product-item.liquid, card-product.liquid, product-details.liquid. For Online Store 2.0, locate JSON templates (e.g., product.json) to find referenced Sections (e.g., main-product) and edit the linked snippet/section.

Outcomes: multiple users confirmed success after updating all instances (images, captions, overlays, recommendations). Some elements (e.g., Recently Viewed, overlays) require additional snippet edits.

Disagreement on SEO: some prefer direct /products/ links; others argue canonicals and breadcrumbs should point to collection-nested URLs to boost collection rankings. Changing canonical was deemed risky for products in multiple collections; breadcrumbs with schema were added instead.

Status: no platform-level URL change; solution is theme edits. Ongoing questions for Dawn/Empire/Focal and tag-based indexed URLs.

Summarized with AI on December 15. AI used: gpt-5.
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Thank you for your help, but isn’t it crazy that this happens? I went from 300 visits a day to 30 because of this problem…

Then with each theme update I have to reciprocate everything again… it’s quite absurd this situation.

So you recommend that I change everything with product.url and I should solve the problem? As it seems to be just that…

Can I ask you if you can give me a check on the fly on my site https://cartonlineitalia.it ? I use screaming frog and I see that the first entry I get as an error is this one: “Canonical, transformed to canonical”
Thank you very much !