Woocommerce SEO and Product attributes

[JustinMurray]

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?

[JustinMurray]

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.

[JustinMurray]

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)

[StephanSolomonidis]

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.

[JustinMurray]

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?

[Tymen]

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