My slides from my ThinkVis presentation on Magento SEO.

1. An SEO’s Guide to Magento
Commerce
By Paul Rogers
Head of Digital Marketing for GPMD

2. About Magento
• Powers well over 100,000 ecommerce sites
worldwide
• Three different versions: Community,
Enterprise & Go
• Bought by eBay in 2011

3. Configuration
• Check your headings
• Redirects are set to 302 by default
• Ensure that you’ve got auto-redirects for URL
changes turned on
• Only auto-redirect to base URL if you’re
installing Magento on the root

4. Redirects & Rewrite rules
• Ensure that you’re using 301 redirects instead
of 302 redirects
• Remember to redirect query strings &
pagination too
• Think about hooks for rewrite rules before you
need to
• Keep an eye on auto rewrites (-1 appended to
category name etc)

5. Orphaning products & pages
• Cross-sell products and avoid 404s
• Maintain rankings and traffic
• Add links to related pages
• Be clear with the status of the product, brand
or collection (eg: out of stock, redundant
range etc)

6. 404 Case Study
• Jewellery retail client with over 100k pages
• Client removed lots of relatively new
collection pages
• Very few links to these pages
• Around 1,000 pages removed
• Rankings dropped considerably across the
board

7. URL Structure
• Top-level products
• Use directories and file extensions to help with
GA filters & rewrite rules
• Redirect generic catalog pages to search-friendly
pages or remove them:
– fredperry.com/catalog/product/view/id/15940/s/spot-print-cycling-
shirt/category/156/
– fredperry.com/men/shirts/multi-tipped-shirt.html
– paulsmith.co.uk/shop/paul-smith-wallets-443/paul-smith-wallets-
damson-saffiano-leather-billfold-waller-agxa-1032-w270-d/product.html

8. Trailing slash canonical issue
• Tried to resolve it and failed – several times!
• Use the canonical tag to point search engines
to the right page
• We implement manual redirects if there is a
problem
• Lots of potential transferrable value

9. Catalogue Search Pages
Disallow the /catalogsearch/
directory in the robots.txt file
and do a removal request for the
folder in GWT

10. Dynamic pages being indexed

11. Dealing with dynamic pages
• Add meta robots rules to apply noindex,
follow tags to dynamic pages
• Start submitting removal requests in GWT

12. Indexation Case Study #1
• We did 1,000 removal requests
per day
• Rankings improved very soon
after we removed the pages
• Organic traffic improved by over
50% within six weeks
Message in GWT

13. Indexation Case Study #2
• No message in GWT
• Around 70% of the pages in the index were
caused by layered navigation
• Very little organic visibility
• Once we removed the pages organic traffic
increased considerably
• Rankings improved massively for generic
terms

14. Turning Dynamic Pages into Static
Turned valueless pages into static landing
pages
/brands/breitling-
watches.html?gender=17052
/brands/breitling-watches/mens.html
/brands/breitling-watches/navitimer-
collection.html
Categorisation module on the way!!!

15. Case Study
• Turned well over 1,000 dynamic filter pages
into static pages
• Added content to each page
• Gradually built some links to the pages
• Generated around 50,000 extra organic visits
over 12 months
• Accounted for around 8% of all incoming
search traffic over 12 months

16. Be careful with internal links
Internal links to
category pages
and collections

17. Pagination
• Use rel=next and rel= prev to prevent Google
from indexing paginated versions of pages
• You can use our SEOpack plugin to implement
this

18. Sitemaps
• I would recommend having xml & html
sitemaps
• Video sitemaps
• Brand / segmented sitemap pages
Mageworx extended sitemap module

19. Be aware of reviews
• Review pages are duplicate content (as
content is also on product pages)
• Lots of extra pages being indexed (and they’re
valueless)
• Would recommend blocking with meta robots
rules

20. Performance / Speed
• Jpeg Mini – super image compression
• Minimizing CSS & JS
• Using Mod_Pagespeed
• We’re looking into full-page caching – Inviqa
have already done this so contact them for
questions

21. Schema markup
Markup for products with videos
Price markup
Schema module for Magento

22. Retargeting > product-level
• Module about to be released
• Retargeting for specific products gets better
results

23. Use the Magento app
• Magento has a pre-made mobile module that
allows you to create a generic mobile phone
app
• You can also create a mobile site – styling
required
• Research The North Face’s example
Magento Mobile Module

24. Links
• Get Elastic Guide to Rating Schema for
Ecommerce – LINK
• My Magento SEO Guide – LINK
• Blueglass’s visual guide to rich snippets – LINK
• The SEOpack Plugin – LINK
• The Mageworx Sitemap Module – LINK
• Magento Mobile Module - LINK

25. Thank you for listening!
Feel free to email any questions to
paul@gpmd.co.uk!
Our SEOpack Module:
magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/gpmd-seopack-9820.html