SEO consequences of setting a collection as canonical?

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I have a few high-variant-count products where it’s best to split them into multiple products, both as a consequence of the dang 100 variant limit as well as the linked-options tweak not yet being functional on 2.0 themes to hide “unavailable” option combinations that would result from having them combined. The result is I have a product split into 14 separate products, tools that are absolutely the same other than the shape and measurement. This leads to SEO duplication since the products have the same specs other than the options.

  • I don’t want to mess with an app just to combine this small number affected products, it’d be nice to have them combined but I don’t want to have a subscription fee or app technical overhead.
  • I don’t want to have them combined without removing unavailable option combinations anyway - it’s terrible user experience to have a bunch of non-functional options

SO… Instead of having 14 super-similar products all cannibalizing each other in search rankings I’m considering setting a collection containing them as canonical to the group of individual products and just linking to that collection as I would a single product. I’d put the product info into the collection-description and have each product-description contain minimal content other than maybe internal links to the other sister-products.

Might there be any technical consequences or SEO reasons I may not be considering that would make this a dumb idea?

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Hi @amanda-91

I’m Richard Nguyen - CRO Expert at PageFly- Free Landing Page Builder. With over 5 years’ experience in providing solutions for over 100.000 stores to help merchants increase their conversion rates, I’d like to provide you with some suggestion with the hope they would be helpful to you

Shopify variant element has some limitations as it only shows the products variant set when you add the product to the store, you can not combine variants together.
Facing this issue, PageFly offers an advance “Variant swatches element" to help you combine: size, color, label,…. each type has 6 options to display with image also.

You can understand more about these 2 element with a detail instruction here

If you want to do more customization for your store to increase conversion rate, you can consider using a Shopify page builder. And PageFly, Advanced Page Builder with 24/7 support live chat is a great app that helps you easily customize your Shopify pages and make it more attractive.

If you find my comment useful, please let me know by giving it a Like. Thank you!

Richard - PageFly

Hi there,