We all think that Magento is a great ecommerce platform. There are however some pretty serious SEO issues that exist at this time (v1.0). This thread is intended to start a discussion of current issues so we can all help each other resolve or at least flag so we can get them on the development cycle.
1) Multiple URL’s per product
At this time you can access a particular product via multiple urls. This is a fairly serious issues for any SEO aware/ savvy webmaster
A product can be accessed in at least the following ways:
a) straight product.html
b) via the category url - /category/product.html
c) if the product belongs to multiple categories - category1/product.html, category2/product.html, category3/product.html
d) non rewritten url - /catalog/category/view/type/52/id/5/
all urls appear to be being spidered (at least in google) and indexed - just wade through this lot and you will see:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q;=site:demo.magentocommerce.com&btnG;=Search
What does this mean:
a) Link equity is diluted
b) MAY cause duplicate content issues (emphasis on MAY)
c) Will at least double / triple spidering activity by the search engines.
d) May cause sipder traps
Think about a site with 10,000 skus and 20% of them have multiple categories - that is a load of duplicate urls and a load of unnecessary spider activity - think bandwidth alone.
Possible resolution
Engineer code to allow for a master category per product and then always use that url if product is added to further categories.
Turning off category URL’s is also an options but a) does not appear to be working for some people and b) is not the ideal route as in my opinion categories in the url provide an important user experience.
Anyway - there may be other ways around this that I have not thought of or I may have just missed something obvious - if so let us know.
I will be looking forward to other SEO issues people may have - it would be great to get this nailed down 100% SEO wise - i am sure it will not take too much work.
Like I said in another post (thanks for you answer Kasper), categories url are not rewritten when you change view mode, limit mode, order mode or filter url ...
Even if we can solve this problem with attribute rel="nofollow" or still class="robots-nocontent", it’s an important problem for us !
Another problem that will be great to resolve is with parameters categories in product url.
When you change path categories in system admin, it doesn’t work neither ...
I forgot : With french language, we have some problem with accent in product url although categories url are converted normally (é => e, è = e, etc.)
The issue of multiple urls for the same content, either products or categories is VERY problematic.
The productid should be added to the product URL. Right now if you have 2 products with identical names then you have a conflict… but with adding the productid you have a unique id. In addition to this it is easier to handle 301 redirects using regular expression matching.
Great observation Golles, I was just looking at the SEO factors this morning and this was something that concerned me as well. We need to have one and only one URL used for each category/product (via master category would work well for me). The non-redirected URLs will probably always be present and we’ll probably have to block those out in the robots.txt via regex - but in reality, if nothing ever points to the non-rewritten URLs then they shouldn’t be spidered to begin with - this applies to almost every website that has URL rewriting - in most cases the unwritten URL would work just as well as the rewritten one.
One of my biggest concerns always comes from dilution due to filtering and pagination. I’m sure a 3rd party will have to work on this as it’s not something I expect from Magento, but, again, for category pages we have multiple URLs focusing on the same keyphrases, using the same title, and meta info. Two issues I’ve noticed with the layered nav:
(1) At least in my out of box install with sample data, it is not using the rewritten URLs - hence probably how the non-rewritten URLs got spidered on the demo store.
(2) Every time you add a layered nav criteria, it appends to the URL, making it a saparate page. But again, keyphrase targeting is the same. So instead of one page focused on your product category - with filtering and pagination you may have hundreds of pages competing for the same phrases.
I think ideally I’d like to see an AJAX form of filtering, pagination, etc. so that no matter what we’re doing, it’s only one URL and one page. That or nofollow the layered nav links but that might not be ideal when you’re looking at a high level category for drilling down.
BTW, the paging and filtering also use the non-rewritten URLs, so you may be looking at /apparel/shirts then when changing the paging it changes to /catalog/category/view/order/name/dir/asc/limit/15/id/4/ - NOT something I’m very fond of from a usability perspective as well. I haven’t investigated whether these are just settings issues or if this is the intended functionality.
Good finds, I just started noticing the duplicate url’s in 1.0. The “Use categories path for product URLs” worked like a charm in 0.8xx if I remember correctly, I hope this gets fixed soon!
The solution posted by seoguy in http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/6019/ is inventive but not feasible for us unfortunately
Good finds, I just started noticing the duplicate url’s in 1.0. The “Use categories path for product URLs” worked like a charm in 0.8xx if I remember correctly, I hope this gets fixed soon!
I just tried it and I think it works. Have you remembered to refresh the Refresh Catalog Rewrites?
A quick SEO issue I’ve just noticed is that when browsing categories, when you have more than one page of products, page two does not link as /category/products/page2, but in the following format (using someone else’s site) http://www.theclimbingshop.com/shop/catalog/category/view/p/2/id/9/ whereas page one was http://www.theclimbingshop.com/shop/vetements/femme.
This dilutes the effort put in to setting up categories with SE friendly URLs and potentially means that items shown by default on page two or three will not have the same SEO friendliness… The ideal solution would be to have page two, three and so on appearing as: http://www.theclimbingshop.com/shop/vetements/femme-2 or even /femme/page2
In some ways this is similar to the issue of multiple URLs linking to the same content, but in this case the ‘correct’ URL doesn’t exist yet.
@j.morell
I agree with your comments. It seems as though the logic for URL rewrites was primarily dirrected at products and the rest of the magento’s URL structure such as categories has not been fully addressed.
I do see several issues in the category pages that are problematic for duplicate content. The attribute filtering as well as “sort by” (best value, name, price).... I think all of these should have the option of having a “NOINDEX” tag configurable from the admin.
Sorry to be a pain. Is there any more news on this ? Its really a big barrier for implementation especially for anyone who take a conservative / low risk approach to their SEO.
IF the developers need help with getting these URL issues fixed, it maybe wouldn’t be a bad idea to pick the brain of “Shumisha” over at http://extensions.siliana.com . Hes the developer of SH404SEF for the joomla CMS and made buitiful URLS out of one of the most non-SEF carts out there… Virtuemart. The component is in use on my current site ( http://www.supremedefense.com ). The component logs all the different URLS that go to the same destination and you select which one you want to use. I have products that are in MANY categories and I have ZERO duplicate content issues..
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