SEO and tracking

Search metadata on this store comes from three layers. An unexpected title or description usually means one layer has overridden another.

Shopify Admin holds the per-page title and description you type on a product, collection or page.

The Plug in SEO Plus app owns a set of templates in theme settings that can generate or truncate titles and descriptions. Whether these override what you typed in Admin depends on one checkbox per group.

The theme layout adds a few rules of its own, including the noindex behaviour described below.

Edit a single page's title or description

1. Open the product, collection, page or article in Shopify Admin.
2. Scroll to Search engine listing and click Edit.
3. Set the page title and meta description.
4. Save.

Edit a specific page here. Use the templates only when you want to change every page of a type at once.

Edit the templates

1. In the theme editor, open Theme settings, then SEO - Page Titles or SEO - Meta Descriptions.
2. Edit the template for the page type you care about. There is one for Homepage, Page, Search, Product, Collection, Catalog Page, Blog, Article and 404, plus a Default.
3. Save.

Each group has a checkbox reading Also apply templates to manually entered page titles, or the equivalent for meta descriptions. Leave it off. Turning it on makes the template overwrite what someone typed in Shopify Admin, which is rarely what anyone wants and is hard to notice.

Maximum length (characters) cuts off anything past the limit without a warning.

Stop a page being indexed

1. In the theme editor, open Theme settings, then SEO - Exclusions.
2. Add one path per line to Noindex Pages, matching the path exactly, for example /pages/internal-promo.
3. Save.

The theme adds noindex to any page whose path appears in that list.

Two other noindex rules run automatically and are not editable in theme settings. Any product tagged no-index is excluded. Any page showing a tag filter is excluded, which stops filtered collection views competing with the collection itself.

Change the Google Tag Manager container

1. In the theme editor, open Theme settings, then GTM Tracking.
2. Confirm Enable GTM Tracking is on.
3. Set Enter GTM ID to the container ID, in the form GTM-XXXXXXX.
4. Save.

Changing the container ID redirects every event on the storefront. Coordinate it with whoever owns the analytics property, and check a live page's data layer afterwards rather than assuming it worked.

Structured data

Structured data also comes from Plug in SEO Plus, under Theme settings, SEO - Structured Data. It carries the logo, the social profile links used in the organisation markup, and the review app the markup should read ratings from.

Set Review App to match the review app actually installed. A mismatch produces structured data claiming ratings that no page shows, which search engines can flag.

Verify the change

1. Open the affected page in a private window.
2. View source and search for <title> and <meta name="description".
3. For a noindex change, search for <meta name='robots'.
4. For GTM, open the browser console and check dataLayer is populated.

Do not judge the result from a search engine listing. Those take days to refresh and will show you the old version long after the theme is correct.

Developer map

The SEO template settings are owned by an installed app rather than by this repository. See Third-party apps.