How to Avoid Magento 2 SEO Mistakes?

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As the inchoo.net announced Magento 2 is a new star on the block as soon as it is released by Magento in the coming days. Beside a lot of advantages of Magento 2, in a recent analysis reveals some common SEO mistakes. I hope this checklist of Magento 2 SEO Mistakes will be useful for anyone launching a new store or upgrading the existing Magento 1.X store.


1. Homepage title “home”

Homepage is usually your strongest page in terms of link equity and the page that can rank for your most important keywords. For this reason, it’s not a good idea to have its title say “Home page” as that doesn’t describe what your website is all about.

2. Having a default layered navigation

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Layered navigation is a hell for the SEO. Generally, layered navigation or other filtering and sorting parameters are the things that you try to avoid. However, the truth is that common ways, blocking them with a robots.txt disallow, is not the best solution to deal with this case. The most convincing explanation is whatever you do; they can still be indexed and can’t be crawled. Instead of trusting in robots.txt disallow approach, some of you tend to apply Meta noindex, follow on URLs with those parameters. Overall, one remarkable thing is do not apply both robots.txt disallow and Meta noindex.

3. Robots.txt not blocking the site search results

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While disallowing layered parameters through robots.txt file is a bad practice, what you really want to disallow are your site search results, or in most implementations, specifically the /catalogsearch/ URL path.

Google’s Panda algorithm is known to penalize websites that – among other things – allow indexation of large amounts of their site search data. Why? Because Google doesn’t like displaying search results within search results meaning they don’t want to index your site search and they want you to stop them.

Some Magento 2 websites not only forgot to disallow the site search results through their robots.txt file, they actually actively link to their site search results from homepage. They linked the homepage logos of different brands to site search with that brand name as a query parameter.

4. Pointing layered URLs back to category with rel canonical

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At the time when Rel canonical was released, Google wanted to apply it in solving content duplication. But it did not really make sense because some cases were not duplication when layered filters actually changed the content of the URL.

What you really want is to place Meta noindex, follow on those layered URLs and get them out of index while enabling the link juice to flow through them through your navigation and product listings to other pages that you need to rank.


5. Indexing both http and https versions of the website

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Having http and https versions of the same URL indexed is a great example of duplicate content and a great example of where rel canonical should be used to consolidate the duplicates into a prefered version. If the https version is the prefered one (and it should be since Google considers https to be a ranking factor), the http version of the same URl should have a rel canonical pointing it to https version, or if http is the prefered version the https version should point its canonical towards it.

6. Missing availability in schema.org microdata markup for product offer

Microdata markup helps Google and other major search engines understand the content of your pages. It helps them figure out what’s your price, what’s your special price, your reviews and so on.

It’s also a feature necessary for automatic product updates for Google Merchant Center. Since we’re missing the availability markup, neither SERP results will be featuring our product as “In stock” nor will automatic availability product updates within the Google Merchant Center work.

Can you name a common Magento 2 SEO Mistakes number 7 ?

Now you have a list of Magento 2 SEO Mistakes for your Magento store. It’s time to check before you launch your own Magento 2 store or “upgrade” of the existing Magento 1.X store.

Remember that an online store is a dynamic system having many things you can’t predict. One day everything may be ok and the next day Google Search Console shows strange 404 errors. This means you should track your site optimization and Magento 2 SEO Mistakes to notice all important changes and solve the issues quickly.