Woocommerce SEO and Product attributes
-
Hi friends! I have a question that is advanced Woocommerce and seo-related.
I'm seeing http://www.mywebsitex.com/pa_keyword/indexed in Google, but it cannot be properly optimized, and I would prefer to have a WordPress Page indexed for that keyword instead, which also lists those products and can be fully seo optimized. Woocommerce SEO plugin by Yoast lacks documentation and I have no clue if that would even fix this. I do have the Taxonomy (pa_keyword) set to not include these in the sitemap, but there doesn't seem to be a way to noindex/nofollow product attributes.
1. How can I best accomplish this?
2. Why are product attributes indexed by default? -
I actually looked into this a little further before developing conditionals, and I noticed it is possible in Yoast. You have to go to Products - Attributes, then the Gear icon, then select noindex.
-
Thank you, I think that is a good solution, and I've done similar conditional noindex tags on real estate websites, so I'll try it out for Woocommerce. I was wrong to think this should be included in Woocommerce, and instead it should likely be a component of the SEO plugin (in my case that is Yoast SEO)
-
Hi Justin,
Yes, you're correct in your response on Nov 26: XML sitemap exclusion won't guarantee that the pages aren't indexed, as they can still be discovered by Googlebot. Instead, you'll need to edit your Wordpress theme. I'll give some instructions for the 'Storefront' theme here, which should work in the majority of cases, but you may need to amend them if your theme is heavily customized.
When the page loads, it'll call the get_header(); Wordpress function, and pass the argument 'shop' to it, like so: get_header('shop');
That will prompt Wordpress to go looking for a file in the theme root called 'header-shop.php'. If that file doesn't exist, it'll load the default header.php file instead. If you do have a header-shop.php file, edit it to add the meta noindex tag on category pages. If you don't have a header-shop.php file, make a copy of header.php and rename the copy header-shop.php, saving it to the root folder of the theme.
Now in the header-shop.php file that you're amending or have just created, add something like the following before the closing tag:
if ( is_product_category() or is_product_tag() ) {
echo "";
}
You should take care to ensure that the conditional statement there is working: you don't want to inadvertently noindex all of your shop pages! So test carefully on a local version of the site, and make sure that you aren't seeing noindex tags in the source code of the non-taxonomy pages.
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to your second question. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because the developers would receive more criticism for enforcing noindex tags on certain categories of page than for not providing a noindex feature. If they put noindex on taxonomy pages by default, for example, and didn't provide an easy plugin for removing it, they'd probably get complaints about that. Or it just isn't an important enough issue in terms of the overall WooCommerce development roadmap.
-
That is only for the XML Sitemap exclusion though. Just because they are not included in the sitemap, doesn't mean they won't be indexed, correct? Shouldn't their be a way to noindex/nofollow these?
-
Hi Justin,
I also work with Woocommerce/ Yoast and in the settings of Yoast you go to XML Sitemaps and than the tab: taxonomies. There you can exclude the (product attributes. I had the same with all images who where indexed seperatly.
Hope this helps you!
Regards
Tymen
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How is Single Page Application (SPA) bad for SEO
Hi guys. I am quite inspired of SPA technique. It's really amazing when all your interaction with the site is going on the fly and you don't see any page reloads. I've started implementing the site with this instruction and already found nice guys to make the design. The only downside of the using SPA which I can see **is the **SEO part. That's because the URL does not really change and different pages don't have their unique URL addresses.
Web Design | | Billy_gym
Actually they have, but it looks like: yoursite.com/#/products yoursite.com/#/prices yoursite.com/#/contact So all of them goes after # and being just anchors. For Google this mean all of these pages is just yoursite.com/ My question is what is really proven method to implement the URL structure in Single Page Application, so all the pages indexed by Google correctly (sorry I don't mention the other search engines because of market share). The other question, of course, is examples. It will be great to see real life site examples, better authority sites, which use SPA technique and well indexed by search engines.1 -
Duplicate Product Descriptions for Each Variant
Hi, I am setting up a Shopify e-commerce store and I have a questions about duplicate product descriptions. I have written unique product descriptions for all our products. Each product has at least 10 color options. I am thinking that it would look better if I created each color variant as a unique product. i.e. store.com/nice-shirt-blue, store.com/nice-shirt-red ect. Here is the kicker. Would I be penalized for using the same product descriptions for each product type?
Web Design | | Jon_B0 -
3 Ecommerce Stores All Under One Roof - Good idea? SEO Benefits? Concerns?
I run multiple ecommerce stores in one particular market. I've been considering merging them all together and using a Single sign-on and allowing users to swap between websites. Each site is unique in their own way and are already ranking well on their own. But the goal is to merge them altogether to create a better user-flow. An example of what I'm trying to do is what Zurb.com does (http://zurb.com/apps). They have all of their different products but they're under different domains. Another example is http://www.envato.com/sites and all of their brands to their sites. Will this negatively impact SEO efforts across the board or will we eventually benefit from merging them. Also, is there a correct way to do this. For example; Should I make one site the "parent website" and then create sub-directories of the other websites and work on the DNS to point to the right locations. I'm not the technical person on our team but I do lead the marketing and I can't find the right answer for this question.
Web Design | | venturagroup0 -
Parallax, SEO, and Duplicate Content
We are working on a project that uses parallax to provide a great experience to the end user, and we are also trying to create a best case scenario for SEO. We have multiple keywords we are trying to optimize. We have multiple pages with the parallax function built into it. Basically each member of the primary navigation is it's own page, with all subpages built below it using the parallax function. Our navigation currently uses the hashbang method to provide custom URL's for each subpage. And the user is appropriately directed to the right section based on that hashbang. www.example.com/About < This is its own page www.example.com/about/#/history < This is a subpage that you scroll to on the About page We are trying to decide what the best method will be for trying to optimize each subpage, but my current concern is that because each subpage is really a part of the primary page, will all those URL's be seen as duplicate content? Currently the site can also serve each subpage as it's own page as well, so without the parallax function. Should I include those as part of the sitemap. There's no way to navigate to them unless I include them in the sitemap, but I don't want Google to think I'm disingenuous in providing them links that don't exist, solely for the purpose of SEO, but truthfully all of the content exists and is available to the user. I know that a lot of people are asking these questions, and there really are no right answers yet, but I'm curious about everyone else's experience so far.
Web Design | | PaulRonin2 -
WIX? is it any good for SEO
Hi people. I have just built my website www.bellagiolimousines.com.au using WIX. I am in the process of optimising for SEO, and after reading a couple of older posts i.e 2012; I read that some SEO consultants do not like WIX. However with their recent upgrades, I was hoping if anyone else has had any recent experience with WIX? I have spent a considerable amount of time building this site, and I don't want to waste anymore time in optimising it, if I am not going to receive a top 3 organic SERP. Hope to hear from someone real soon!
Web Design | | Giorgio680 -
Implementing a new Nav Bar: Best practice, SEO benefit, your suggestions?
Hi Mozland, We are going to have a new Nav Bar for our site built from the horror that we currently have to up with. We want to make it a simple affair, similar to The Guardian two-tier Nav Bar - main menu which will drop down to the 2nd tier according to what you clicked on in tier one. Regular stuff, I think. Any suggestions, from your experience, about how best to implement this, what to include, what not to do, what can be included and done to make it as best it can be to get people to peruse our site as easily as possible? Thanks
Web Design | | Martin_S0 -
How to make AJAX/javascript website more seo friendly?
I have a website that is heavy on AJAX. I need recommendations on how to add content as well as other on page ompitizations. The website is a luxury brand for 6 resorts, each with their own subfolder. The website is http://me.graficode.com/preprod/.
Web Design | | Melia0 -
Old SEO keyword "articles", are they hurting rankings?
Hello, About two years ago, the company I work for hired an SEO firm to improve organic rankings on our site. The SEO company's primary method for doing this was producing "articles" that are not really articles but keyword stuffed pages with lots of hidden, internal links to other legitimate pages on our site. Examples: http://www.creamright.com/Isi-Chargers-articles.html http://www.creamright.com/How-To-Make-Whipped-Cream-article.html http://www.creamright.com/Cream-Whipper-articles.html Obviously, this strategy wasn't greatly successful and we cancelled our work with the firm. However, we still have all of the "articles" on the site (about 50-60 pages total) and each page is navigable from the html and XML sitemaps. Additionally, the SEO firm we used built a lot of useless links to these pages from BS directory sites which are all still active. The question I have is whether we should remove these "article" pages or should leave them alone? Although I'm sure they aren't helping any of our SEO efforts, could deleting the pages after two years negatively impact our search rankings? Thanks in advance for any help on this, Doug M.
Web Design | | Loganshark1