Shopify stores
Products linked through collection paths
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
- Based on
- Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.
What is wrong
Collections are category pages that group products together—like a "Winter Coats" or "Sale Items" section. When your shop creates multiple paths to reach the same products (for example, both example.com/coats/winter and example.com/sale/winter-coats showing identical items), search engines waste time crawling duplicate versions of the same products instead of discovering new ones. This dilutes the authority that should concentrate on one canonical version.
Why it costs you
The cost is that Google may choose to index the wrong version of your product pages, or spend crawl budget on duplicates when it could be finding fresh products you want to sell. Either way, your newer or less popular products get discovered more slowly, and your best-selling items may not rank as effectively as they should.
How to fix it
Fix this in Shopify by using the collection URL structure setting to ensure each product appears in only one primary collection path. If you need a product to appear in multiple places for customer browsing, use Shopify's cross-linking or collection filtering features instead of creating duplicate collection pages. Add a canonical tag in your theme template pointing duplicate collection pages to the primary version if you cannot eliminate the paths entirely—your theme developer can do this in one edit rather than page by page.
What the audit tests
- Internal links reach products at /products/, not through a /collections/ address
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