Multi-Store Hreflang Tags Shopify App
If you have two or more Shopify stores for the same business serving different countries or languages, you may be losing traffic and sales from poor SEO.
The hreflang tag tells search engines like Google what version of the page from what store, to serve users. The tag also prevents duplicate content penalties from similar content being on multiple stores.
The SEO Challenge With Shopify
Nearly all Shopify stores do hreflang tags with a {{ canonical_url }} value. The big SEO mistake is you must have the exact same collections, products, pages, blogs, and articles in each store—all with the same URL handle—otherwise your tags will point to non-existent pages (404s).
If one store doesn’t contain all the same products, or any URL handle for a store varies between another store, standard hreflang tags in Shopify are bad for SEO. Google will crawl non-existent pages and you will lose organic traffic.
The way to historically solve this problem is to have the exact same store setup and URLs across all stores. If you have stores in different languages, that is bad for SEO, and bad for the user experience, because your URL handles should be in the same language as the store.
Grow with Multi-Store Hreflang Tags
Your Shopify stores can now have perfect hreflang tags to increase sales from organic search.
Without the app, your customers may be taken to the wrong store when coming from Google or Bing search, which can lead to confusion in international shipping and poorer conversion rates.
By using the app, organic conversion rates may increase as visitors are served the correct store for their region and language in search results.
If you’ve previously used a universal language in your URLs across stores to deal with hreflang tags, you can now catapult SEO and improve the user experience with URL handles in the same language as the store.
Highlights
- Works for all content types. Collections, products, blogs, pages, and articles will be matched so stores have perfect hreflang tags.
- Any store with any language can have matching hreflang tags.
- Automatic or manual installation of liquid. No messy code surprises. Easily roll out the app.
- Save time. Products automatically map to each other based on SKU values.
- Partner friendly. Contact us for support.
Help with the App
Once you begin to install the app through the Shopify marketplace, you are asked to do an automatic or manual installation.
Each option inserts a file called multi-store-hreflang-tags.liquid into the snippets folder on your live theme. If you choose the automatic option, {% include 'multi-store-hreflang-tags' %} is also inserted between the <head> and </head> tags of your live store. The manual install requires you to insert this line of code yourself.
These are the only changes to your theme. The remaining data is stored in metafields, which is independent of themes.
Remove any prior hreflang tags from your theme when using the app otherwise Google will receive conflicting information.
We suggest removing old hreflang tags once the app is installed in all stores. Mapping does not need to be complete. Most multi-regional and multi-lingual Shopify stores have poor hreflang tags to begin with.
By installing the app in all stores, you will automatically have the home page mapped and all products will auto-map if they have the same SKU value.
Copy the multi-store-hreflang-tags.liquid file from the “Shippets” of your live theme into your development theme. Insert {% include 'multi-store-hreflang-tags' %} between the <head> and </head> tags of the development theme’s theme.liquid file.
You can archive a store within the app. This unpublishes hreflang tags from your account. You will still be billed. To stop billing, remove the app via the Shopify apps of your admin.
If you want to remove all pieces of code, remove the multi-store-hreflang-tags.liquid file in the “Shippets” folder and remove {% include 'multi-store-hreflang-tags' %} from your theme.liquid file.
Please reach out to our support by filling in the contact form. Share your question(s) or issues, and share as much detail as possible to stop emails going back-and-forth. If it helps to include screenshots, you can include screenshots that are privately hosted online because attachments through the contact form are not possible.
Fix Your Shopify SEO Today
Get the Multi-Store Hreflang Tags app from the official Shopify Apps store today: