Comments on: Magento SEO Development

By: Brett

Brett — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:03:28 +0000

I am somewhat new to Magento and was doing a search on how to customize the design of the Blank SEO theme when I found this very informative article. Does anyone know if there are instructions available for customizing the Blank SEO template? We are primarily interested in customizing the header/masthead right away.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:32:30 +0000

I am having the same issue with multiple stores. I have a client with many e-commerce domains in the same industry, and he is worried about getting penalized if all of the sites are hosted/databased in one magento installation. Wouldn’t it be better to do seperate installs for each store? Thanks for the help!

P.S this blog rocks!!

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:12:12 +0000

@Tao – thanks for chiming in, but I think it’s important to clarify the post from Google that many of us in the SEO world are quite familiar with. If you read closely, it is noted that “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” and “Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site’s performance, but it doesn’t cause penalties” that it is truly debunking the myth of a duplicate content penalty – but it clearly states that having this duplicate content can cause issues. It’s the whole reason for Google pioneering the use of this tag to begin with. Should it be a top priority for SEO on your site? Probably not, but, if you want to do as much as you can then this should be something certainly to pay attention to. So, I wouldn’t consider it time wasted at all on your part =)

By: Tao @ Greners.com

Tao @ Greners.com — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:04:32 +0000

According to Google from the link on the Magento SEO blog by Roy Rubin duplicate content as addressed by the canonical url extension is not an issue and time would be better put into many other SEO projects. I wish I had read that this morning before I began following the directions from the Yoast article and here to make that work. Here is the link: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:24:03 +0000

@Brady – that is an excellent idea. Ideally, you should have all products from your old site (if you need to prioritize, start with any pages that currently rank in SERPs or have links to them) 301′d to the new URLs. That way, your new pages will be indexed and show up in the search results in place of your old ones.

If that is too big an undertaking, or even to use this as a failsafe “catch-all”, what I would suggest then is to take your old URLs, if they all start with some kind of pattern like “/shop/…” then create an .htaccess rule to take all URLs that start with /shop (assuming none of your new ones do as well) and create a script that “explodes” (or breaks apart) the URL and redirects the user to a search page with the query the text that would have made up the URL (you can even strip out the arbitrary category id that OSc includes in the URL).

By: Brady

Brady — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:49:08 +0000

Great Post Guys!

What would you recommend on creating a better 404 page that could take the url from an old domain and show products matching the url. ie. we have a site built years ago with OSc that has 10k indexed pages that need to redirect to the new site.

OLDdomain.com/shop/10×14-smoking-sign-p-55555.html

Turns in to search of : “10×14 smoking sign p”

(the “p” is there because all we would do is strip out the record number and the dashes)

I am not sure if I can do a actual 404 page, with the search result in it (that would be best), but we can absolutely redirect to a search..

NEWDOMAIN.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=10×14+smoking+sign+p

Possibly we can perform a search, if it returns one product send them to that product’s page directly?

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:24:23 +0000

@Rasmus – Either approach is acceptable, though given our needs to change the behavior disabled product routing, along with our need to allow clients to control redirects, we chose to implement this as a custom extension. It is a testament to the extensibility of Magento that it is possible to customize and extend routing to this degree, all by extending core controller files.

Above all, just make sure that you’re not losing any link juice!

By: Rasmus Lindgren

Rasmus Lindgren — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:52:31 +0000

Hi
Thank you for a great post. Could you explain a little more on how you have implemented the 301 redirection from unavailable products to new products or categories? Are there an extension for this or have you done some clever code? (or do you simply edit the .htaccess eaxh time?)

By: Alex Becker

Alex Becker — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:01:41 +0000

Pretty nice feature I must say. By the way, this blog is so well designed from a user, design, and search engine friendly standpoint — great job. I retweeted this post @aybecker – hopefully you get some readers out of it. Keep up the good work.

By: Elle

Elle — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:38:43 +0000

I am so thrilled to be using magento. Compared to the last shopping cart I attempted, magento is so much easier. I love that the pages can be made SEO friendly, however I still seem to have some issues with the lists (SID)and such- some of the pages indexed are a bit awkward, but I am working on figuring that out. There is so much to learn and work with- trying to read up on as much as I can, so thanks.