Selecty and its impact on SEO

In this article:
About Selecty
About canonical tags and multi-domain mode
How Selecty can affect SEO: Automatic redirects

✔️ About Selecty

Selecty was developed to help store owners manage automatic and manual switching between languages, markets, and currencies on their Shopify stores. It provides flexible tools like selectors and recommendation banners that make it easy for your customers to navigate between different localized versions of your store.

However, it’s important to understand that Selecty is not an SEO optimization tool.

Shopify itself handles most of the technical SEO-related aspects of a multilingual/multi-market store. This includes elements such as:

Sitemap generation
hreflang tags for language and region-specific content
Canonical URLs
Structured data

Important: Our application does not interfere with or enhance these SEO settings. Selecty's role is purely functional and user-focused, aimed at improving the user experience by making it easy for visitors to find their preferred language, region, or currency.

✔️ About canonical tags and multi-domain mode

When using multi-domain setups in your Shopify store (e.g. example.com, example.fr, example.de), canonical tags play a crucial role in helping search engines understand which version of a page is the “main” one. This helps avoid duplicate content issues and keeps your store’s SEO healthy.

Canonical tags are not managed by Selecty. They are primarily generated and controlled by your Shopify theme. Because multi-domain functionality is a built-in feature of Shopify, theme developers are expected to implement canonical logic correctly when developing or customizing themes.

Important: If canonical tags are not configured correctly, search engines might index the wrong version of your content or treat pages as duplicates, which can negatively impact your SEO.

✔️ How Selecty can affect SEO: Automatic redirects

Automatic redirects are the only aspect of our application that might have a secondary influence on SEO.

About Automatic redirect

Selecty offers automatic redirection based on a visitor’s browser language or geographical location. This is intended to improve user experience by guiding visitors to the most relevant version of the store (correct language, currency, or domain).

To avoid unintended SEO issues, Selecty incorporates bot detection mechanisms to recognize search bots. When the application identifies a visitor as a search bot, it attempts to prevent the automatic redirect. This ensures that search engines can reliably crawl and index the correct version of your pages.

Limitations of Bot Detection

Modern programming languages and detection algorithms cannot guarantee 100% accuracy in identifying search bots. There is always a slight chance that:

Some bots might be misidentified, or
Some human visitors could be mistakenly recognized as bots.

Because of this inherent limitation, while the impact on SEO is minimal, it is important to be aware that automated processes are not foolproof.

Additional Guidance on Auto-Redirects and SEO

For further insights into how automatic redirects interact with SEO - especially regarding managing multi-regional and multi-language sites - please refer to Google’s best practices on the subject: Google’s Managing Multi-Regional Sites.

Updated on: 21/05/2025