Duplicate meta titles or meta descriptions in Shopify

Imagine you were looking at different books to buy. One of them caught your interest but you decided to pass on buying it today.

Next week, you come back to the book store to buy the book. Only now you find it has a brand new cover and the summary is completely different. Now you're not sure if you're still interested or what the book is actually going to be about.

Nobody likes the bait and switch so you'd most likely put the book back and buy something else.

Now imagine you were looking through search results and one kept changing week to week. You'd be confused about what the product actually was and if you can trust the company. Especially if a competitor is in the next, more stable, search result.

The title and description tags

In the search results, you have some control about what title and content is shown. Not perfect control, but enough to influence search engines.

This is controlled by your <title> tag and meta description tag which looks something like <meta name="description" content="...">.

You'll often hear the title tag and meta description referred to as meta tags when referring to both of them.

Every HTML page should have one <title> tag and one meta description tag.

Given how search engines already take liberties with how meta tags are shown in search results, you don't want to confuse them even more.

That's why I recommend one <title> tag and one meta description.

Duplicate titles or descriptions

As is often the case with Shopify stores, sometimes the code in your theme goes sideways and you end up with extra meta tags.

Perhaps an extra one was accidentally added when you copied-and-pasted some code.

Or perhaps an app added copies and didn't clean up after themselves.

Or the most common one I see, stores run many SEO apps and each app thinks they are the boss of the tags.

Whatever the source, having duplicate title and description tags will mess up your search engine results and likely confuse your customers, just like that book.

Search engines aren't going to know which version to use. The first meta tag they see? The last one they see? Or worse, ignore your recommendations altogether and use a random bit of content found on the page.

One quick note, JSON-LD for SEO doesn't do anything with meta titles or meta descriptions. So if you do see duplicates, it's definitely not us!

Remove duplicates

The easiest way to know if you have duplicate meta tags, is to look at the HTML of your page.

Pick any page, the homepage works in a pinch. Right click and go to View Source.

Search for <title or <meta name="description (notice I didn't close the tags). There should be one of each.

If you have duplicate meta title or meta description tags in your HTML, it's urgent to remove them.

Before going any further, backup your theme!

How that's done will depend on who/what added the duplicates.

If it's code in your theme's layout, you should be able to simply delete the extras (again backup your theme if you haven't already).

If those tags are from an app, look through their settings, ask the app's support, or hire a developer to help debug.

At no time should an app add duplicate <title> or meta description tags. But sometimes there are bugs or neglectful developers who don't play nicely.

Some SEO scanning tools, not Shopify apps, can scan for and find duplicates of these tags. They can be useful to pinpoint if you have a problem and which pages have the issue. Don't buy a scanning tool just for this purpose though, that's a waste of money. If you have a tool that you already own, or you find a free scanner, check to see if they offer this feature.

Keeping junk code like these duplicated meta tags out of your theme is part of the maintenance of your store. It's not fun, pretty, or cool but it can be impactful on your overall store health.