For the many who are looking for an enterprise eCommerce solution, it doesn’t get any better than Magento’s combination of an open source platform, comprehensive gallery of extensions and reputation for stability. On paper it can sound like the perfect solution, and it’s not surprising that it’s usually one of the first names to be rattled off when a new, exciting eCommerce venture is starting up or an established site is looking to take that next step up.
So all these newly launched Magento-driven sites have seen huge improvements in traffic and conversions and proudly strode to various #1 positions across every niche in the SERPs. Well, no, not exactly – not all of them.
Undoubtedly a powerful platform, a plain vanilla Magento install has some issues that aren’t ideal from an SEO perspective. An awful lot of content has been produced on this topic, with over 60,000 exact match results for “Magento SEO tutorial” returned by Google.co.uk and a plethora of videos on the subject.
Many of these deal with the configuration options available to users upon setting up their store, what options to enable and disable, ground rules that will ensure a site avoids some duplicate content issues. But with all the will in the world sometimes this just isn’t enough. Some aspects of Magento’s configuration, particularly its approach to layered navigation can leave a once healthy SEO campaign in a world of hurt.
We’ve seen examples of successful but relatively small sites (approximately 500 products, a handful of categories and subcategories), suddenly take a dangerous nosedive after a Magento relaunch. It seemed like despite the relatively small number of important pages, search engines were crawling and indexing tens of thousands of URLs. The layered navigation, built of a lattice of attributes each of which can be filtered by a series of values, is at the foot of this problem. Left to its own devices, each possible permutation of attribute and value can create a unique URL, even if the content is thin or potentially duplicate. Each new block of these URLs dilutes your PageRank, making Google less likely to crawl these pages. This can manifest as a dwindling number of referrals from long tail keywords, which will have an abrupt effect on a site’s traffic and particularly on conversions as long tail keywords often represent a visitor who is further along in the purchasing process.
At least your big #1 traffic-bringer is safe, no? This dilution of PageRank will also pull begin to pull authority away from your important pages, which can lead to a collapse in your broader, more generic (and generally higher traffic) short tail keywords.
We understand that each store is different and that the problems inherent in a given site might require any one of a range of solutions. With this philosophy in mind, Blueclaw’s new Magento SEO Extension gives you a whole arsenal of options to avoid this problem and allows you to choose exactly how you want to work around it.
With direct control over Robots META tags and Robots.txt you can control the way that search engines spiders interact with your content, even establish on an attribute level which URLs should be set to NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW.
It also much improves the flexibility offered by Magento’s default Canonical settings. You can include or omit Canonical tags from paginated content as well as remove page parameters and even price attribute values from them. Magento can become a hive of duplicate content, and having the power to deploy canonicals as and when you see fit is a real advantage when resolving this.
If your issues originate within the layered navigation, the extension also grants the store owner vastly improved control over attributes and and categories. Should your site be plagued by duplicate page titles or meta descriptions due to pagination, the extension has one-click solutions for ensuring that each of these is made unique. On the attribute level, take full control of URL and Title slugs whether an attribute’s value should be treated as a prefix or suffix.
Finally, the extension opens up a suite of options pruned from some of the most well-known and successful eCommerce sites on the internet. Taking cues from Amazon.com there is a full suite for optimising your content for web spiders. The extension gives a store owner the power to identify any specific User Agent as a web spider and deliver a more direct navigational route through to the pages that you want to be crawled and indexed – the pages that will ultimately lead to conversions and revenue.
This isn’t hidden text and cloaking, but the best possible solution for giving your users the benefits of a fully filterable product catalogue without trapping web spiders in this same navigational labyrinth.
To read more about the extension there’s a full user manual, tutorial videos on the website. Alternatively, try out the features for yourself with the live demo – everything can be accessed from http://blueclawecommerce.co.uk/store/magento-seo-extension-module.html.
