Category tags in an ecommerce store are a fabulous way to organise your content and you should absolutely use them!
What you should not do is allow Google to list your tags in its index!
Each tag you create for your Shopify store also generates a tag page with a brand new url.
In my website, for example, it might be minsterseo.com/tag/sales-funnel. That’s a great page to send my visitors to if they ask to see everything I’ve published about sales funnels, but it is not good at all for Google’s spiders.
I’m going to use a case study that I found to show you why it is, as an ecommerce website owner, that you need to be smart about your tag usage.
Can You Have Too Many Shopify Tags?
Yes, you definitely can! Take a look at this example I found in the The UK Loose Leaf Tea Company. It opens in a new tab, so you won’t lose this page.
The page that opens is a tag page, you can see this from the /tagged/ element of the url. Down the right hand side of that page, you can read all 234 tag names that this site uses.
That’s a crazy number, especially as most of the tags only have one blog post attached to them.
Remember the job of tags is to help the visitor find related ‘buckets’ of content. I suspect these 234 tags could be rationalised to ten or fewer and provide a much better user experience.
For your own ecommerce store, think about the main themes that your readers want to see. For these guys, it might be
- Black teas
- Fruit teas
- Medicinal teas
- etc
And their readers would be happy to find a dozen or more articles in each category.
However, this isn’t the worst of it!
The owners of this business have told Google that it can index each of these 234 tag pages, and that’s really bad for their SEO, for these reasons:
6 Reasons Why Indexing Shopify Tags is Bad for SEO
These are the reasons that you should always deindex your tag pages.
- Tag pages have very little content on them, known as ‘thin content‘ which we know Google doesn’t like.
- Duplicate content also comes into play when the same post summary is shown on different tag pages and in the blog post itself. Duplicate content is less likely to rank well, so this can negatively impact your blog performance.
- Large websites need to be mindful of their crawl budget. Google spends money to crawl and index your site and if there are several low-value pages on there (which includes tag pages) this can hit your rankings.
- Keyword cannibalisation is when two pages target the same keyword, or Google thinks they do. It doesn’t know which one to rank and so they both (or all) get demoted. Having indexed tags can create keyword cannibalisation with your blog post.
- SEO aside, having all of these tags creates a poor user experience and Google will pick up on this in your stat’s and reduce your rankings accordingly.
- They add no value to your website. They have no content, add no value to the user, and don’t move visitors along your sales funnel towards a purchase.
My Video Review
For more information about this and my full review of the tea company’s tag problems, watch the video below.
How to Check if Your Tag Pages are Indexed
To check whether your own ecom store has got its tag pages indexed, go to Google and perform this search:
site:[your site name] inurl:[the word that identifies the url as a tag]
So, for the UK Loose Leaf Tea Company, the search I used was site:theuklooseleafteacompany.co.uk inurl:tagged
If the search returns any pages, these are indexed and you should set them to ‘noindex’ as soon as you can.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing ecommerce store owners is time. Quite rightly, you’re focused on growing your brand and don’t have enough hours in the day to improving the SEO of your ecommerce tags.
If that’s the case for you, get in touch with me using the form below. I’ll be happy to tell you how I can help and you’ll be surprised at how low the cost of that can be.