Google flagging duplicate content and choosing a canonical can be really confusing. The merchant in this story had 420 products in her catalog. 187 of them had been flagged as “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical”. Traffic was down 34% quarter over quarter. Why? Because she had split out every jacket into a separate product for each color, using the same title tag, same description, same size chart, and Google was shrugging and saying this is all duplicate.
Shopify product duplicates are a problem for stores that want to create separate products for different colors of a product, for SEO reasons, for separate URLs, for separate product images, etc. Google is starting to catch on that this is thin content and it’s an easy problem to fix without reverting to variants.
In this post
- Why duplicates happen
- The SEO damage
- Two fixes that work
- Fix 1: combined listings
- Fix 2: redirects and canonicals
- Which to pick
- FAQ
Why duplicates happen in Shopify stores
When shops reach the hard variant limit on Shopify (which is 2048 variants per product with combined listings, or 100 without), or they want to have per-color photography, or want each color to rank on its own search term, they split one product into ten – “Oxford Shirt Blue”, “Oxford Shirt Red”, “Oxford Shirt Green”, etc. Same content in the description body, same measurements table, same content in the policies, but a different slug: /shop/oxford-shirt-blue versus /shop/oxford-shirt-red.
It’s clever. Each color gets its own url, and thus its own meta title, and set of images. For long-tail keywords like “blue oxford shirt men”. Stupid for duplicate detection.
The SEO damage
Three things happen when Google sees ten near-identical products:
- Canonical confusion. Google picks one as the “true” version and demotes the rest. If it picks wrong, your best-selling color disappears.
- Thin content flags. When 90% of the page content is identical across ten URLs, Google’s thin content signal fires.
- Crawl budget waste. Google crawls ten URLs, learns nothing new, gets tired, crawls the rest of your store less often.
This won’t make much of a difference for a very small store with perhaps 20 or 30 products. However for a larger store with 500 products or more this will be a slow bleed. Rankings will drop over time. The indexed count of items will increase which in turn will serve to decrease the number of sessions from organic search. These effects can take months to reveal themselves as usually nothing will appear obviously wrong.
Two fixes that work
| Fix | Keeps per-color URLs | Keeps per-color images | Fixes duplicate flags | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Combined listings | Yes | Yes | Yes | Low |
| Redirects + canonical | No (one survives) | Loses the rest | Yes | Medium |
| Roll back to variants | No | Partial | Yes | High |
Fix 1: combined listings (recommended)
Combined listings keep all product URLs live i.e. Google will still index “Oxford Shirt Blue” at the slug for that combination, not the slug for the grouped toproducts. However when viewing a specific colour of the oxford shirt, swatches will be displayed to the customer for all the colours in the group and each swatch will link to the other related product(s). The grouping adds an extra layer of organisation and allows every product card to know about its “sibling” products.
To remove the duplicate flag you can also update the description and images for the colors alongside the listing change. Providing unique descriptions per color (even just a note about the dye process or weight of the fabric for that color) and images, even though in a combined listing, will still allow Google to see the related but distinct products.
Rubik Combined Listings allows you to group products together based on the values of metafields that you create, with Rubik Combined Listings forcing you no external API calls and automatic synchronisation when a products stock or status changes. Unlike Shopify’s own native combined listings feature, Rubik Combined Listings doesn’t require you to have a Shopify Plus store, which costs an additional $2300+ per year.
Fix 2: redirects and canonicals
The nuclear option. Select one product to survive per color group. 301 redirect the rest to that one product. Add a canonical tag on the product page to point to the redirected URL. Combine images, descriptions, etc.
FIXES DUPLICATES–but then you lose per-color URLs, per-color rankings and per-color images unless the colors are search terms-which is unlikely. See our guide on Shopify 301 redirects for why this happens. Note: May use only on sites where per-color SEO is of no value.
Which fix to pick
First, ask yourself one simple question: do people search for the colours that you sell? According to Google, “blue oxford shirt men” gets 4,400 monthly searches in the US, whilst ” red Eames chair” pulls up 2,900 results each month. Provided there is reasonable demand for the individual colours, it’s best to keep the per-colour URLs alive, i.e. to list the products combined.
Colors don’t matter much to search (e.g. “black standing desk” vs “white standing desk”) so let’s just point all the same content to a simpler catalog with better promotional language.
When you also want the product page to show only the images relevant to the colour chosen by the customer, use Rubik Variant Images alongside Variant Groups. This extension filters product images by variant, and is a separate concern to the grouping layer.
See it work
See the live demo store, watch the tutorial video, or read the getting started guide.
FAQ
Is selling the same product in separate color listings bad for SEO?
In order to avoid flagging your site for near-duplicate content, you may want to try to vary the descriptions and images of your products to avoid too much duplication. Google will flag near-duplicate content, and will even choose a canonical version of your near-duplicate content on its own (which likely will not be the canonical version you chose).
Do combined listings fix the duplicate content problem?
They address the structural and UX issues, but still products need unique product descriptions and images for different colors to be recognized by Google as separate products.
Should I 301 redirect all but one color variant?
Only if customers would ever search for your site using colors (Which, , they wouldn’t for products such as fashion, furniture, and most things related to lifestyles).
Does Shopify’s native Combined Listings feature require Shopify Plus?
Shopify’s native combined listings feature only comes with the Plus plan, but there are many third-party apps that can provide this functionality on all plans including the basic one (like Rubik Combined Listings).
How do I spot duplicate-content issues in Shopify?
Check Google Search Console > Google Search Console > Pages for “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical” or “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”. These indicate content overlap issues.
Will canonical tags alone solve this?
Using Canonical URLs can help to remove duplicate content from the index. But remember that Canonicals won’t help to have every color of widget rank independently. For that, you’ll need to create combined listings with unique content.
