Hey everyone, I need some advice about something that’s been bothering me. I’ve been running my Shopify store for a while now and things were going pretty well with Google rankings and organic traffic. But here’s what happened - back in February I decided to also sell on Etsy to reach more customers. I used the same product photos and wrote very similar titles and descriptions for my items on both platforms. Now here’s the weird part - around April I noticed my Shopify store started dropping in search results pretty badly. The timing seems suspicious to me. Has anyone else dealt with this kind of situation? Could Google be penalizing my main store because I have duplicate content on Etsy? I’m really worried this Etsy experiment might have backfired on me. Any thoughts or similar experiences would be super helpful. Thanks!
I experienced something similar when I expanded to multiple platforms last year. The correlation between your Etsy launch and ranking drops might be coincidental rather than causal. Google typically doesn’t penalize for content duplication between different marketplace platforms like Etsy and your own domain.
What’s more likely happening is that you may have inadvertently shifted focus away from your Shopify SEO maintenance while setting up the Etsy store. I found that when I divided my attention between platforms, I wasn’t updating my main site’s content as frequently or monitoring technical SEO issues as closely.
Check if your site speed decreased, if you’re still publishing fresh content regularly, and whether any technical issues arose during that period. Also verify that your internal linking structure and meta descriptions are still optimized. The timing might just be unfortunate coincidence with broader algorithm changes affecting your niche.
i totally agree with you. it’s probably not about the etsy shop. there were some big changes in google’s algorithms around that time that affected many. duplicating content on etsy shouldn’t hurt you too much, but keep an eye on your SEO practices overall.