Fix Shopify Pagination Canonical Links

Shopify’s rapid growth as an e-commerce platform brings powerful features, but also unique SEO challenges for store owners. Despite its success, it comes with some SEO challenges. One common problem is with paginated collection pages, where having several pages of products in one collection can create duplicate content issues and cause different pages to compete for search rankings.

Fortunately, this issue can be resolved quickly with a straightforward solution and basic knowledge, which I am going to give you in this blog post.

What Are Paginated Pages on Shopify?

Paginated pages help organise information on Shopify stores. For example, if you have 1,000 products in a collection but only show 100 per page, pagination breaks them up into increments of 10 separate paginated URLs and sets the canonical tag as the URL. The same idea applies to blogs, where you show a set number of posts per page for users to browse.

When this occurs, your URL will look like this:

https://www.ecommerce.com/collections/shoes?page=2

They are usually followed by a user by clicking a number or a next/previous button.

Are paginated pages a bad thing? Well, no, they can be used to improve user experience, and can be used to help users find what they need quickly, and have benefits for site loading times, where you have a lot of products or blogs to present.

The Problem With Pagenated Collection Pages

The main issue when you have paginated collections is that each one of those pages presents the same data, i.e, your H1, your collection text, and other information - and this can cause issues around duplicated content and cause pages to compete in the SERPs for rankings on the first page - causing unstable ranking to occur.

It can also cause crawl and indexing issues with Google itself - if not handled correctly, I see this a lot with e-commerce clients.

The Fix: Canonicalising

Out of the box, Shopify canonicalises to the links itself, such as for /collections/shoes?page=2, it tells Google that the canonical page is also /collections/shoes?page=2. This is known as a self-referencing canonical, so each one of these links becomes a separate entity to search engines.

Where, in fact, it would be better to have it as: For example, /collections/shoes?page=2 should have a canonical URL of /collections/shoes - so the first page becomes to primary page, and all the pages link back to this one as the primary.

Why?  As this tells Google that the main page for this content is on the unpaginated page, not the second or third option for it. It informs Google that the primary source of this content is the main URL, and it's simply a duplicate on every paginated page.

Thankfully, this issue has a quick fix with some simple code inserted into the Liquid Code File in your Shopify theme.

Step 1:
Log in to your Shopify Admin dashboard.

Step 2:
In the left-hand menu, select Online Store.

Step 3:
Next to the Customise button, click the three-dot menu.

Step 4:
Choose Edit code from the dropdown.

Step 5:
Open the theme.liquid file.

Step 6:
In the code panel on the right, look for this line:

<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}">


Step 7:
Replace it with the following code (copy and paste):

{% if template contains 'collection' %}
 <link rel="canonical" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}" />
{% else %}
 <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />
{% endif %}


Step 8:
Click Save in the top-right corner.

Step 9:
All solved, now just verify your canonical URLs are correct and linking back to the primary page.

Summary: Fix Shopify Pagination Canonical Links

Shopify pagination doesn’t have to undermine your SEO performance. While paginated collection pages can create duplicate content and dilute search visibility, the fix is both simple and effective: updating your canonical tags so that all paginated URLs point back to the main collection page. By making this adjustment in your Liquid theme file, you help Google understand which page is the primary source of content, strengthen your rankings, and ensure a smoother user experience. With just a few quick steps, you can turn a common Shopify SEO issue into a lasting optimisation win for your store.

About the Author

I’m Chris Evans, an experienced e-commerce SEO specialist at Searchant. I’ve worked with countless online stores to fix technical SEO issues like Shopify pagination and to build long-term strategies that drive revenue, not just rankings.

If you’d like help optimising your store, explore our SEO Services or feel free to get in touch with us directly.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to see more of my work and insights into e-commerce SEO.

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