SEO issue solved: Product Recommendations Tracking Parameters for Shopify

One of our retainer client’s SEO consultants came to me about an issue with Shopify’s product recommendation URLs in Google Search Console. I didn’t know this, but Shopify adds many tracking IDs into the product recommendation URLs in order to create reports.

For example:

/products/gorgeous-wooden-computer?pr_choice=default&pr_prod_strat=description&pr_rec_pid=13&pr_ref_pid=17&pr_seq=alternating

This was causing the Shopify site to experience a below par internal structure that made it unnecessarily difficult for crawlers to crawl all the pages within the website. The tracking parameters were good for internal Shopify statistics, but it also created 10 times the amount of unique URLs the crawler had to follow.

There are 2 options to fix this:

1. If you don’t care about tracking recommended product performance: Strip the tracking data from the URLs like https://great-website.com/products/white-leather-holiday-short-blue-trim instead of https://great-website.com/products/white-leather-holiday-short-blue-trim?pr_prod_strat=copurchase&pr_rec_id=3330c9992&pr_rec_pid=8835401843011&pr_ref_pid=8835398336835&pr_seq=uniform. This way we profit from the extra internal links, but lose the tracking possibilities within Shopify.
2. If you want to track performance: Add “rel=’nofollow’” to the link. This solution will keep the tracking within Shopify, but the crawler will ignore those links.

The client didn’t care about tracking the recommended product performance so we went with option #1

I achieved this with the following change to the recommended products URL:

It was quite a simple solution but it was an interesting process learning about the impact of tracking on SEO.