Magento’s rewrite engine is known for causing SEO issues, with the numbers being appended to URLs being the most common one. The URLs are created when Magento thinks that the URL is already in use or has been used in the past – uploading via CSV can cause this issue because you’re essentially over-writing the existing URLs.
There’s also an error in a recent Magento Enterprise release that causes a lot of these issues.
Layered / faceted navigation is probably the most common Magento SEO issue and it’s also probably the most detrimental.I would recommend instead using the noindex, follow meta robots tag, which tells search engines not to index the pages, but to still follow the links. You should still have the canonical tag, however I’ve seen very few cases where it’s prevented over-indexation issues when it’s not been added from the start. I’ve also seen plenty of cases where the canonical tag has been implemented from day one of an ecommerce launch, however the pages have still been indexed and lead to duplicate content issues.In the event that you’re having issues with crawl budget, I would recommend using the robots.txt to block the... Read more
Whenever I’ve introduced a blog on a Magento website, I’ve used the fishpig extension, which is basically a WordPress integration module for Magento. The Fishpig module makes integrating the two platforms very simple.
I’ve not seen any benefits of Magento Enterprise over Community from an SEO perspective. The only thing that could arguably be considered is that EE has caching out of the box, so might be faster – but this can be achieved with CE too and is unlikely to make any difference.
The trailing slash canonical issue is one of the most talked about technical SEO issues with the Magento platform, as most URLs on Magento sites render with or without a trailing slash – meaning there are two versions of each page. This generally becomes a problem when large sites have links pointing to both versions, which can lead to both pages ranking and also means the link value is split between two pages.The obvious choice with the trailing slash issue is to apply a rewrite rule, however whenever I’ve tried this I’ve always had an issue somewhere (checkout, admin etc). I use MageSEO to assign a primary URL suffix (either / or no /), which then ensures that the canonical tag points to that suffix on all pages across the... Read more
I personally really like BazaarVoice, because it provides a lot of customisation options and has some really advanced functionality. That said, BazaarVoice is quite expensive and it’s subscription-based.
The default Magento module is actually quite good, although you might want to use additional module or work with your developer to get more from it.
BazaarVoice also has schema support, making it easier to get the ratings schema appearing on your product listings.
In the SEO configuration settings (catalog > search engine optimisation) you can choose whether to serve category paths in product URLs – this is the main thing you need to consider for product URLs. I would recommend using top-level product URLs (eg: domain.com/product.html rather than domain.com/category/sub-cat/product.html) as this will prevent the product being duplicated if it’s featured in more than one category.
Session IDs are very common with Magento and they can cause severe duplicate content issues, as there’s no limit to the number of duplicated URLs that can be generated. Session IDs are used to track a user’s session and they’re usually generated via the checkout, to track what items have been added to cart. A session ID will be appended to the end of URLs, here’s an example: domain.com/page?__SID=df23n54jtklg.
The best way to deal with this is to properly fix the issue, which will require development resource. If you’re not in a position to fix this, I would recommend blocking the URLs via the robots.txt or assigning meta robots rules (noindex, follow) – I would also recommend providing instructions to Google via the parameter handling options in Google Webmaster Tools.
You should also block you checkout pages so that crawlers won’t access pages with the session ID appended to the end of the... Read more
It’s quite common for secure pages to be indexed, however they’re generally just duplicate versions of the non-secure pages, unless you’re using the https protocol across your website. The best ways around this is to either canonicalise https pages to the http equivalent or add a robots.txt file to the https version of the website and disallow certain pages or all.
