Duplicate Content and SEO

BlogFeeder improves SEO by ensuring that content is housed on the same domain as your products. As search engines are looking for content, this can help customers find your store by combining your selling and content marketing efforts. Another added benefit to using BlogFeeder is that customers are kept on your site rather than being sent to an external blog. Sending customers off-site decreases the likelihood that they'll return to complete a purchase, so uniting your blog and store is the right move for conversions.

However, some users have asked if BlogFeeder will hurt SEO by duplicating content between your external blog and your Shopify store. We have taken this into consideration when building BlogFeeder in order to make sure SEO is not negatively impacted. By default, BlogFeeder includes the canonical tag in all imported blog posts, so search engines know where the original version of the blog post resides and that your Shopify blog is not a plagiarized version of your external blog. The SEO benefit while importing feeds is not as great as the benefit of using entirely original content, but BlogFeeder does take into account as many facets of your search optimization as possible.

If you would like to stop BlogFeeder from including the canonical tag, you can easily remove it by  going to your feed settings and disabling canonical tags.

We typically only recommend doing this if you will be hiding or redirecting your external blog to your Shopify site to avoid any negative SEO consequences for duplicate content. Turning off canonical tags can help with SEO since your Shopify store will be seen as the original source of content, but you must then adjust how your external blog works by adding canonical tags, hiding it from robots, or redirecting to your Shopify site with 301 redirects.