In a mobile and SEO service world, site speed becomes one of the most important elements. However, Magento is a slow platform, which, in some cases, can negatively give impact on organic search performance because of its slow load speed.
Not only do users hate slow website, but a slow website will also impact on the crawlability of the website. Therefore, speeding up your Magento installation becomes necessary. There are several common fixes that can be applied prior to, and after setup:
- Use a server with sufficient RAM and configure it correctly.
- Disable Magento logs(default) and enable log cleaning in the back-end
- Utilize a content delivery network like Cloudflare, and if you have a high-traffic website it could be worthwhile to use their Argo product.
- Compress front-end assets and images using a compression service. Even though it won’t compromise on quality, to make a big difference, especially on mobile devices, you can reduce the weight of assets to load it.
Aside from the points above, you can find more site speed, and we would recommend that you work toward making your store load as quickly as possible on all devices.
Product SEO Issues
Simple and Configurable Products: Canonical Fixes
Mostly, e-commerce vendors prefer to use simple products alongside configurable products. Since a lot of products are configurable, Magento users will create the same sweater as a simple product to show the different variations on the product listing page. By taking this approach, you won’t need to rewrite the content on each of these pages.
Therefore, to resolve this duplication issue, you can use the canonical tag – linking back to the core configurable canonical tag-linking back to the core configurable product to keep your product listing pages looking full and to indicate to Google that they are duplicate variants of one item.
Product Title Tags and Headers
By default, Magento tends to create under-optimized title tags and misuses page header tags, while Magento title tag is just the product name that can be both ambiguous and unhelpful. Besides, using title tag will help you manage all of your products. However, if there are hundreds of product’s names, then using tags won’t be an effective use of their time. Therefore, you may need to set a convention which includes product variables such as product type, color, and gender or even brand. Then, manually optimize their little tags for key products within the range.
Moreover, you can also use header tags to make sure that you follow the correct hierarchy for your product-listing pages.
Product URLs
There is a duplication issue that will appear when you use the hierarchical URLs, since you will have multiple variations of the product on individual URLs. Moreover, this issue isn’t only faced by Magento, but by many e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, this approach also helps reduce indexation bloat and allows you to have a single version of a product that can be nested under different categories.
Make sure that you’re using canonicals to identify the main version of each product, if you’re already utilizing category paths in your URL strings.
Moreover, you also need to ensure that you update all internal links and have your developer write the necessary rules of redirecting and that they are implemented when the switchover happens.
Faceted Navigations & Parameter URLs
Regardless of the platform, faceted navigations are notorious for creating duplicate content issues and indexation bloat. Magento is no different, so the parameter URls generated by the faceted navigation are often indexed. As Google only crawls into a portion of your website at a time and you want it to focus on the core pages that provide user value, so Indexation bloat is an issue. You aren’t optimized for crawling if there are hundreds or thousands of URL parameters for it to contend with.
Handling Parameters in Google Search Console
Amending how Google handles the URL within Google search console is a quick win to resolve indexation bloat caused by the URL parameters.
Hence, you can prevent the issue by declaring how the parameter changes the content for the user and by telling Google bot not to crawl into any of the content. Another way is to block the parameter in the robots.txt file but this can cause issues with PPC and other programmatic campaigns, so you’d better check before doing so.
Nofollow Faceted Navigation Links
Nofollow the links behind the faceted navigation might be one of the good strategies. Google won’t crawl into your links if you’re adding a no follow to these links. However, the URLs can still be discovered and can still appear in Google’s index, if they are linked to from the sitemap or from other areas of the website.
AJAX Navigation
Make sure you have an experienced Magento developer on call to avoid you from a nightmare. With AJAX navigation, you can allow users to change the content on the category/product listing page without changing the URL. Besides, you can find many technical issues caused by AJAX, such as creating excess JavaScript, as well as impacting the site speed.
Magento URL Rewrites
A common problem is that Magento can produce category or product URLs that revert back to the original/catalog/path, and duplicate the URLs produced based on the title of the page. Since some URLs can revert back without reason and no 3xx redirect will be applied, these URLs should be blocked and monitored.
Number Appendages
Platform’s habit to add a number to the end of the URL is another common issue with Magento’s rewrites. However, this can happen when the URL is already being used and the rewrites are replacing the old URL without changing it. If these happen, it can cause a number of duplicate URLs and can, in some cases, be a big issue if undetected and unresolved.
Pagination
Product listing pages broken up into pages; this is good for the user but can lead to duplicate blocks of text. To allow webmasters to indicate paginated pages, Google introduced the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags in 2011. To add your knowledge, we also introduce robots=”noindex,follow” tag to the paginated pages.
In conclusion, remember that every Magento implementation is different. Then, custom templates will cause new SEO challenges, but don’t worry as it can be identified on a case by case basis. To make sure that every aspect of the Magento site is optimized, a technical SEO should be included at the earliest stage of the site build process and remain involved throughout the development and post launch.