If you’re using Ahrefs, an SEO toolset that can crawl your website like a search engine would, you might come across an issue stating that your ‘Canonical URL has no incoming internal links.’ If you’re looking to optimize all aspects of your website for SEO purposes – we’ve got an easy fix that will get your Ahrefs health score back in the green.
We were able to fix this issue and get our health score from 85 to 100 so we figured we’d share this little gem to see if it can help improve your website. In this article, we’ll explain the importance of Canonical URLs, the implications of this error, and how you can easily fix this issue in Shopify.
Understanding Canonical URL
The term “Canonical URL” might sound complicated, but it’s a simple concept to grasp. A canonical URL is the URL that you want search engines to consider as the “main” version if you have multiple pages with similar content.
It helps prevent duplicate content issues that could hurt your SEO rankings. The use of canonical URLs signals to search engines which version of the page to index, making it a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal.
Recognizing the Problem
The ‘Canonical URL has no incoming internal links’ error occurs when a page that you’ve marked as the main version (canonical) isn’t being internally linked to from any other page on your website. In essence, your chosen “main” page is like an island, detached from the rest of your site.
This isolation can confuse search engines. They might question why a “main” page has no internal support, which could subsequently affect your page’s ranking.
Steps to Identify the Issue on Ahrefs
If you’re using Ahrefs, it’s relatively easy to find pages with this issue. Here’s how:
- Run a site audit for your website on Ahrefs.
- Once the audit is complete, navigate to the ‘Issues’ section.
- Look for the issue labeled ‘Canonical URL has no incoming internal links.’
- Click on it, and you’ll see a list of URLs that have this issue.
The Collection Page Challenge in Shopify
Some Shopify themes organize products under a collection page, creating a URL structure that goes from the collection page to the product page (i.e., yourwebsite.com/collection-page/product-page). This structure could lead to the canonical URL (the direct link to the product page: yourwebsite.com/product-page) receiving no internal links, resulting in the issue at hand.
How to Fix the Issue on Shopify Products
The key to fixing this problem is to create internal links pointing to the canonical URLs.
To fix this issue you will need to get into the code of your theme. This might seem intimidating but you can always revert back to the original code – this worked perfectly for us on our Flex Theme Shopify website.
1. On the left pane navigation go to -> Themes -> Edit Code
2. Go to the Snippets -> product-thumbnail.liquid file
3. Press CTRL+F / Command+F to search in the code to find all instances of “product.url | within: collection” and remove “| within:collection”. It should just read ‘product.url’ like in the screenshot below.
4. Save the code (it will save as another version so you can always go back to the original code)
In addition, it’s important to note that fixing this issue might not instantly reflect in Ahrefs. It might take a few weeks for the changes to get indexed and for Ahrefs to update your website’s status. If you are a paid user of Ahrefs you may have the ability to re-crawl your website after this change to see the immediate impact.
As always, remember to do a full backup of your website before making any significant changes, and if you’re unsure about anything, don’t hesitate to seek professional help. SEO and web design experts can provide valuable insights and practical solutions to help resolve this issue efficiently.