Maintain SEO for filterable store pages

Search engines treat each unique URL as a separate page. On an ecommerce site, filtering and sorting add query parameters to the URL, so the same product category page can be reached at many URLs, for example ?sort=price&page=3. Search engines see those as separate pages showing duplicate content, which lowers your ranking.

The solution

Use a global variable to tell search engines to ignore the extra parameters in the URL.

The current_request global variable

current_request is a global you can use in your Liquid. It returns a request object describing how the current page was accessed. It offers many attributes; these three are the ones used below.

When a page is accessed with query parameters, you may want to show different content. There are a few ways to do this.

Using fullpath

{% if current_request.fullpath == "/current-offers" %} This content will show if there the full path exactly matches "/current-offers" This will not match: "/current-offers?sort=price" {% else %} This content will show in all other circumstances {% endif %}

Using query_string

{% if current_request.query_string == "" %} This content will show if there are no query parameters {% else %} This content will show if the page was requested with query parameters {% endif %}

Using a combination of path and query_string

This method is useful when you want to change the content based on which query parameters were used.

``` {% if current_request.path == “/current-offers” %} We know we’re on the Current Offers page We don’t yet know if it was accessed with query parameters

{% if current_request.query_string != “” %} Ok so the page was accessed with query params

{% assign params = current_request.query_string | prepend: "&" %}

{% if params contains "&page=" %}
  The page was accessed with the query parameter: page!
{% elsif params contains "&sort=" %}
  The page was accessed with the query parameter sort!
{% else %}
  The page was accessed with some other query parameters! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
{% endif %}   {% else %}
The page was not accessed with any query parameters   {% endif %} {% endif %} ```