Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI
      Moz Local

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. Digital Marketing
    3. Web Design
    4. Woocommerce SEO and Product attributes

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Woocommerce SEO and Product attributes

    Web Design
    3
    6
    6202
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • JustinMurray
      JustinMurray Subscriber last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • JustinMurray
        JustinMurray Subscriber last edited by

        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. 🙂

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • JustinMurray
          JustinMurray Subscriber last edited by

          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)

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • StephanSolomonidis
            StephanSolomonidis last edited by

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • JustinMurray
              JustinMurray Subscriber @Tymen last edited by

              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?

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Tymen
                Tymen last edited by

                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

                JustinMurray 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • alan-shultis

                  Is managed wordpress hosting bad for seo?

                  hi, i would like to create my own website, but I am confused either to choose cpanel hosting or managed wordpress

                  Web Design | | alan-shultis
                  0
                • vtmoz

                  Does the blog widget with latest blog-posts at homepage helps in SEO?

                  Hi all, We are planning to add a widget at our website homepage which displays recent blog-posts with dates. Google favours new and latest content. So will these consistent new posts help in improving website ranking? Thanks

                  Web Design | | vtmoz
                  0
                • KempRugeLawGroup

                  Does an age verification home page hurt SEO?

                  There's a microbrewery in our area that just launched its first website. It has the "verify your age" homepage (which is not really their homepage, but I don't know what it's called) before you can enter. It looks like this: http://angrychairbrewing.com/ Anyway, does this hurt them at all from a rankings standpoint? Also, assuming bots/spiders/ROGER can crawl sites like this, (which I think they would have to be able to do) how do they get around this verification? Thanks, Ruben

                  Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup
                  0
                • Ron10

                  What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?

                  what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?  My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about.  Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google?  I'm not really sure.   He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users.  This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site.  I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions.  Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron

                  Web Design | | Ron10
                  0
                • Bromtec

                  White Text / Black Background & SEO Impact

                  Does anyone know of any testing / studies with evidence that Google prefers dark text on a light background vs. light text on a dark background? I have a website that currently has light text on a black background, and really like the way it looks, but am concerned that the style may be hurting SEO. Moreover, redesigning something inverse with the same quality would be a large project and fairly costly, so I'd like to make sure the benefit will really be worth the cost before moving forward.

                  Web Design | | Bromtec
                  0
                • csmm

                  Pages vs. Posts for SEO

                  Hi, I would like your thoughts about pages vs. posts for SEO. I understand the difference in terms of WP structure and have read the SEOmoz blog post about setting up your site for SEO success (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). However, if you're trying to rank for a particular keyword, it seems that either one could work, from an on-page SEO perspective, as far as title tag, URL, meta description, etc. So how do you decide whether to set up a page vs. a post? What are the pros and cons, from an SEO perspective, about using one vs. the other? Thanks in advance! Carolina

                  Web Design | | csmm
                  0
                • Naghirniac

                  What is the difference of HTML5 and web 2.0? What is web 2.0 and is this better for seo?

                  A little bit confused with the new stuff. The web 2.0 webpages are so much better? What changes?

                  Web Design | | Naghirniac
                  0
                • BlakMajik

                  Mozcon London 2010: Top 10 tips - Design for SEO PPT Not Available for Download!

                  Hi - title says it all really! Just watched the video and throughout it they refer to the wireframes/site examples being available via the ppt download. However, even as a PRO member having purchased the DVD bundle I cannot find a link to download the presentation. Can anyone help please? Thanks in advance!

                  Web Design | | BlakMajik
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.