How do I get good SEO for collections filtered by tags?

Many shops are set up to have their collections filtered by a single product tag or multiple product tags.

For SEO, the issue is that when filtering a collection by tags the filtered collection will often have the same page title and meta description as the unfiltered collection page. Duplicate page titles and meta descriptions- bad for SEO.

One solution is to say that the collection is the canonical URL for all filtered collections. That means that search engines will only index the collection and not all of the filtered collections- missing a big SEO opportunity.

Page titles

With Plug in SEO you can generate unique page titles and meta descriptions for the collection and each of its tags using templating. The setup is straightforward.

Let's say we have a 'Ties' collection. Products in this collection are tagged 'Formal', 'Cartoon' and 'Casual'.

This means we'll have the collection page on the URL:

/collections/ties

and when filtered by tag:

/collections/ties/formal

/collections/ties/cartoon

/collections/ties/casual

In your Shopify admin go to Online Store Themes Customize theme SEO - Page Titles

Under 'Collection' enter this:

%% current_tags || join: ', ' || prepend_not_empty: 'Buy ' || append_not_empty: ' and more ' %% %% collection.title %%

This will give us four unique page titles:

/collections/ties

Ties

/collections/ties/formal

Buy formal and more ties

/collections/ties/cartoon

Buy cartoon and more ties

/collections/ties/casual

Buy casual and more ties

We now have unique page titles for the collection and filtered collection!

The code we have here is pretty straightforward and can be customised to however you want these page titles to read.

Remember, with Plug in SEO, you can set the collection page title template either in your theme settings as we have here, or for a single collection. And in all places use our extended Liquid code.

This code:

%% current_tags || join: ', ' || prepend_not_empty: 'Buy ' || append_not_empty: ' and more ' %% %% collection.title %%

means:

join: if there is more than one current tag, join them up with commas like 'cartoon, casual'

prepend_not_empty: if the collection is being filtered by tags, prepend 'Buy '

append_not_empty: if the collection is being filtered by tags, append ' and more '

If you don't want to tweak this, simply copy and paste it into your theme settings and it'll work perfectly.

Meta descriptions

Similarly, for our meta descriptions, we can make them unique in a filtered collection like this:

/collections/ties

Ties. Fred's Ties for every occasion: high quality, best prices.

/collections/ties/formal

Ties including formal styles and much more. Fred's Ties for every occasion: high quality, best prices.

etc.

In your Shopify admin go to Online Store Themes Customize theme SEO - Meta Descriptions

Under 'Collection' enter this:

%% collection.title %%%% current_tags || join: ', ' || prepend_not_empty: ' including ' || append_not_empty: ' styles and much more' %%. %% collection.description || strip_html %%

As with page titles, if you want this to be different per collection, you can edit the collection in your Shopify admin, setting the 'SEO meta description' using Plug in SEO extended Liquid code as above.

Any questions? Email us at help@pluginseo.com