7 common Magento SEO mistakes

7 common Magento SEO mistakes

When dealing with Magento store’s SEO, these are the 7 most common basic mistakes I encounter. Some of these are inherited from the development stage of your projects. I hope this checklist will be useful for anyone launching a new store or checking their live site:

1. Homepage title “home”

If I had a dollar for every Magento store out there I’ve seen with a homepage title “home” I’d be a rich man. The homepage is usually a CMS page. Go in there and change the title of the page into something more suitable such as “Blue Widgets Online Store – Example.com”.

2. Using “default description” field

System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default description – Leave this blank or you’ll have such a mess of duplicate descriptions on your store that don’t really describe the given URL that it will be unbelievable. Also, please make sure your meta keywords are not “magento, magento commerce” etc.

3. Not turning on rel=canonical

Save yourself from lots of duplicate content issues. Turn canonicals on for both products and categories.

4. Logo title and/or alt “Magento Commerce”

Logo, usually in the top left of your website. Don’t have it say “Magento Commerce”. I’ve seen that a lot of times.

5. Forgetting to turn meta robots to “index, follow” and remove robots.txt disallow after a move from staging/dev site to the live site

System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default robots “INDEX, FOLLOW”.

Sometimes people leave this as noindex, nofollow on dev server and forget to change it when they migrate to the live server.

6. Having a default layered navigation

Layered navigation is a hell for the SEO. For more detailed explanation on this issue, read my guide on how to handle Magento layered navigation SEO issues.

7. Building a sitemap with sample products and sample categories

I’ve seen this one as well. Check what’s in your sitemap.xml before you submit it to Google. No sample products please! 🙂

Can you name a common Magento SEO mistake number 8?

If you need any help, we can do a Magento SEO Assessment for your site.

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94 comments

  1. Number 8 – Not enabling canonical tag on root/homepage. Magento doesn’t offer this native functionality and needs to be added to the code manually.
    Number 9 – Not removing /home from the XML sitemap. Without the homepage canonical tag or a NOINDEX command you’ve advertised to Google that /home is a page you want indexing and is often a carbon copy of /.
    Number 10 – Not removing .html from your URLs. Simply replace this suffix with a / in config to tidy up your page URLs.
    And so forth…

  2. YES – you can leave the – Using “default description” field : in System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head blank but
    here what magento doing to genrate the titel: 1+ 2 + 3 = TITEL
    1 System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head Title Prefix
    2 CMS HOME PAGE
    3 System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head Title Suffix

  3. You should also set up 301 redirect so that those pages dont exist for the visitor. Did you check other variations as well such as www and non-www version of the same?
    n eCommerce website being deprived in SEO approach can’t expect good visibility anymore; tips shown herein sound pretty much valuable! (Isn’t it good to follow something that is to us is a proven result?). Facts displayed on homepage title, description (yes, Meta keywords & logo saying no “Magento”), canonicalization, sitemaps (with no sample products) and much more – just seems to get highly optimized by search engines (and reversibly, suiting to searchers’ queries) so far.

  4. SEO-friendly eCommerce platform would rather mean optimizing the products, whatsoever sold along the website, in an effort for search engines and therefore the end users to see and follow.

    Spencer Yao says something very clever about it. Powerful SEO features will hence include SEO-approachable URLs, Meta Data, Page Title, Sitemap, Easy-to-Follow Navigation Structure and much more as listed here.

  5. seo plugin require for magento ecommere page optimization?
    If yes, please suggest

    Without SEO plugin, we can’t optimize the magento pages? please explain

  6. Because in my footer social link option i can only put my url, there is no any option to edit it, and my all social link on my store footer showing no follow attribute.

    Hey Toni, Thank you for such valuable information. We are suppose to start the SEO for one of our clients who has magneto based eCommerce website. Your mentioned points will really help us a lot.

    Hi, what should we write in Default title, title suffix, title prefix, title description for an ecommerce site Dealing in Ethnic clothes and books ?

  7. Good article. helpful
    I recommend you to write an article on Plugins of Magento, which one suits more on E-commerce platforms?
    by keep in consideration of new comers in E-commerce SEO.

  8. Hi Toni
    Can you please tell how to remove my no follow social link from my magneto ecommerce Eclipse theme?
    Because in my footer social link option i can only put my url, there is no any option to edit it, and my all social link on my store footer showing no follow attribute.

  9. Perfect timing. We got our first Magento SEO client and came across your post for tips. Very first thing was having “HOME” as the title tag. Nice summary Toni.

  10. Hey Toni, Thank you for such valuable information. We are suppose to start the SEO for one of our clients who has magneto based eCommerce website. Your mentioned points will really help us a lot.

  11. Hi, what should we write in Default title, title suffix, title prefix, title description for an ecommerce site Dealing in Ethnic clothes and books ?

  12. I see the product quick view showing up as a duplicate page title / meta description of product, where can I do no index for quick view?

  13. hi have gone by your video to put seo on my site and have gone to google crawl url.how long will it take for it to show up on google 2 week still not a thing showing up is there other videos that i could look at i went of the seo starters video

  14. Great Article!! I’m having some really bad duplicate content issues with my store. I have removed the index.php from all the URL’s as this was causing some issues, but I see that the sitemap.xml’s output is still including the index.php URL’s for sitemap. Any Idea how to omit the “index.php” from the sitemap’s URL??

    1. Could be a number of things. Are you sure a new sitemap has been generated since you removed the index.php part from the URLs?

  15. Do we need to add product tags in Magento?? To my understanding it is the customer who needs to add the product tag. Does it have a plus effect on SEO or negative effect?

  16. Hi,

    I’ve 3 Magento stores, but I’m facing a problem with one of them. When I search on Google “Name of my store” the first result of my Magento store is from a CMS page and no my home page, as it supposes to be.

    I’ve checked everything as listes here, update my robots.txt, update sitemap and upload it to Google Webmasters, but no way… The first result is a CMS page… Could anyone give me glue?

    Thank you

  17. I have 60 products in a category, each one have 2 links to a products (1 image and 1 is text). It’s a good ideas to have nofollow in the img link and have only a link in the anchor text?
    Thanks

    1. It’s pretty much never a good idea to nofollow an internal link.

  18. I shared a post on FB for my site, kmtactical.net It pulled up the page header image, but under the image, it included a “product description” which read, “Beats for sale – Hip Hop – R&B – POP – Club Music. Any help to adjust this to ready actual item phrases?

  19. Hi,

    I have struggled to build my store and almost completed as we have faced many issues that make us delay building the site.

    I found your article and found it what you are good at.

    I would like to have a professional advice for what I have to do as next step to succeed in online business and wondering how much cost I I need for it as I have limited budget.

    Your kind reply would be appreciated.

    Best regards,

    SadayoshiMiyakuni

    1. Hi Sadayoshi,

      thank you for your comment, I’d love to see how we can help you out. I have sent you an email with more details and we can continue the conversation over there.

      All the best,
      Aron Stanic

  20. HI…
    System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default robots “INDEX, FOLLOW”.

    Sometimes people leave this as noindex, nofollow

    if i leave it as noindex, nofollow and do the custom seo of everypage and every category than the search engine index it or not?

    Thanks

  21. Thanks for making it as a simple and clean point. We made 1 mistake but now we make it correct. thanks Toni for your nice and very informative article.

    1. It is unlikely that adding an extension will result in Magento speed improvement. Maybe removing some 🙂

      There could be a 100 different things that are causing your Magento based online store to be slow. To determine which factors are affecting your speed the most and how to improve it, I’d suggest a Magento technical audit.

  22. SEO# 8, Don’t forget IMG ALT tags (Image Label in Magento).

    These can either add to the keyword use IF needed OR add terms not used elsewhere. Remember that they are used as image titles so they need to make sense. ALT tags are also good general practice

    Comment on SEO #1: I’ve seen both amateurs and professionals use page titles poorly (Title = Home, Welcome, Index, and NOTHING). Authors of page building systems never stress this or include prompts telling the new user -THIS IS HOW GOOGLE WILL LIST YOUR WEB SITE!

  23. Hi Toni,

    Thanks for these SEO tips for Magento. We are a dutch developer team who developed a new on-page SEO plugin for Magento: ReloadSEO.

    I think this plugin can really help Magento users writte better content and rank higher. You can check it out at:
    ReloadSEO

    Would love some feedback!

  24. Can you set product tags to noindex? They cause duplicate content issues when I run a site audit. Is this a common problem in Magento?

    1. Actually it’s not very common because in most cases Magento stores don’t use product tags. You should set them to noindex, but there is no admin config for this, you need custom coding.

  25. Once I have finished big SEO entry How do I check for blank general and metadata fields in Magento, in case I missed any. 🙂

  26. How toxic for seo is it to have a sitemap with sample products? Our site is only about 15 pages but the sitemap has 190!
    Is this an issue?

    1. You should also set up 301 redirect so that those pages dont exist for the visitor. Did you check other variations as well such as www and non-www version of the same?

  27. An eCommerce website being deprived in SEO approach can’t expect good visibility anymore; tips shown herein sound pretty much valuable! (Isn’t it good to follow something that is to us is a proven result?). Facts displayed on homepage title, description (yes, Meta keywords & logo saying no “Magento”), canonicalization, sitemaps (with no sample products) and much more – just seems to get highly optimized by search engines (and reversibly, suiting to searchers’ queries) so far.

  28. SEO-friendly eCommerce platform would rather mean optimizing the products, whatsoever sold along the website, in an effort for search engines and therefore the end users to see and follow.

    Spencer Yao says something very clever about it. Powerful SEO features will hence include SEO-approachable URLs, Meta Data, Page Title, Sitemap, Easy-to-Follow Navigation Structure and much more as listed here.

    Yes, how Analytical tools’ been helpful to promotions, should be well understood and utilized. An importance of higher site performance with good loading speed should also stay uncompromised – and something more and more to go along…

  29. I like it.

    All referred in tutorials are great to understand.

    1 additional but common problem I had seen is a use of sitemap feature of Magento.

    Any opinion about that?

  30. I’m doing SEO for a client and this is the first magento site i have worked on. I noticed they only use the default title, description, and keywords. I’m going through adding these things individually to each page but there are a few pages I probably wont touch so i would prefer to keep the default for those pages. So i guess my question is: can i keep the default description AND use specific descriptions without the default overwriting everything else? Does this make sense?

  31. In reference to John Ramsey post on the 04-06-2012 at 21:19, Toni Anicic said to keep the simple products live but not making the invisble. Surely this will cause lots of duplicate content issues. They will be listed in the sitemap (they are even listed when invisible). Google will search and you will have duplicate content. Should you just make the product, nofollow no index. You customers browse the site and see the configurable product but then in google shopping they see configurable and simple.???

  32. Hi
    I love you guys tips but unfortunately i did not find it soon enough and have a MASSIVE problem with duplicate meta descriptions, every page indexed with Google has the default description which has nothing to do with my site. i have removed default meta description like you said but that now.

    HOW DO I FIX THIS, PLEASE HELP!!!

    Thanks

  33. @Bill DeCamp,

    Since /home is not linked anywhere from the front-end of your store, just disallow it using robots.txt or add canonical to the homepage or 301 redirect it to the homepage using .htaccess or Magento’s rewrite engine. All of the solutions will work 🙂

  34. Ok…I only had 4 of the 7 most common mistakes:) Most of
    them are simple fixes that you just do not think about when you
    setup the site. I am having trouble with the fact that Google
    thinks we have 2 home pages, a page called http://www.sitename.com and
    another page called http://www.sitename.com/home – not sure how to get rid
    of the /home – should I just forward /home to the domain or is
    there a setting in Magento that I am missing? Any suggestions are
    appreciated.

  35. Understood, thanks.
    My example is exactly very low competition keyword, and the site architecture is such that there are many empty categories, so I was concerned that if 0 result pages start showing up, someone would take interest in it.

    On the point of SERP team, yup, that’s what they do, but if there’s an incident, they can escalate it, and proper action would be taken (like in case of vesti.rs). I’ve personally been a part of that procedure in several cases. But that’s how it worked 5 years ago.

  36. @Srdjan,

    There’s no way an empty category would rank high enough to be clicked especially if it’s 302 redirected.

    It is possible, though, on google.rs where competition is not that high and if it wasn’t competitive keyword you searched for.

    Members of SERP quality team are not directly responsible for “hammering” the websites as Matt Cutts explained, they just give feedback that engineers use to fine tune the algorithm, it has nothing to do with specific websites but the ability of algorithm to figure out those empty searches.

    Also an empty search result page is in no way similar to an empty category page. Search pages should not be indexed at all according to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

  37. That again is questionable from SEO pow – in SERP you’re advertising you have a page that holds value for a certain query, but then you redirect searcher to your homepage, which has nothing to do with what person has been searching for.
    Few years back I was working as a member of SERP quality team at Google, and these are the situations we were instruct to monitor. That’s were my doubts come from. If I was to percieve a website showing up in result pages, and offering zero value for different queries (in example, someone would search for Basketball shoes, and your website pops up as a result, but holds no products , or redirects to homepage, that would be marked as “Not Relevant”), I would report it.
    Concrete example: while working on SERP analysis, I noticed website vesti.rs popping up every now and then with a zero result search result page, for many different queries. I reported it, and it got hammered. Website owner understood the issue and corrected it, but still it took months for it to get back to it’s former strength.
    All things said, I think Magento should offer the option to exclude empty categories from sitemap.

  38. @Srdjan, I think the case you described is very related to the problematic of out of stock products and SEO – check our blog.

    You could 302 that category to its root category if it exists until it gets products, just like you’d do with out of stock products.

  39. Let’s just allow for the posibility that there are enabled empty categories in a site. In one case, ERP might be controlling whether there are products in a cat or not, and there might be periods of time when the category is empty, or all the products in it are out of stock. Or any other reason. I think that guys at Google SERP analysis team would not like a website that pops up in a search with zero value.. ? For me, it’s just an empty search result page, and if there are a lot of those cases for a single website, I would report it as spammy.

  40. @Srdjan, why would you create a category if you don’t have any products for it? You can always delete empty categories.

  41. Hey Toni, What is your view on the fact that Magento
    generates sitemaps with empty categories? How does that impact SEO?
    Thanks

  42. Really great points here, I’m in the process of working on some SEO updates for my work and I’m doing all the research I can for Magento SEO. I’m having a bit of trouble with the “label” tag under Images in the the product directory. I need to try to figure out a way to turn those into “ALT” and ‘TITLE” tags separately, when I find out this I will write a blog post on my site.

  43. Hey all, I see lots of you come here searching for “Magento robots.txt”, you should read my friend’s post over at ICG – link removed/read our blog.

  44. @Toni Yeah but the trouble is that alot of my clients products start off with the same content and Google is flagging a ton of content as duplicate meta description cause of it, there is some 1700+ products. Guess I will need to write some custom conditional code so that if there is no real meta set then dont show the tag.

  45. @Alan, yea, that happens, it’s not perfect but it’s better than having the same description on all pages (using default description).

    The best practice would be to write your own meta description for each product.

  46. It seems that Magento is using the start of the product description for meta description if no meta description is set, which is really bad

  47. @Glenn,

    Don’t beat yourself up, it’s a common mistake, it’s in the slides 🙂

    You should eventually get back on your feet. To accelerate the process, go into Webmaster Tools > Health > Fetch as Googlebot.

    Over there, fetch your homepage. Now you’ll have a button “Submit to index”. Click it and choose “URL and all linked pages”.

    This should get you back in index faster.

  48. We recently upgraded our site and to prevent duplicate content-punishment we added meta noindex to the updated site during development.

    Don´t you think we forgot to remove that after we made it live! And we did not notice it until several weeks. We got totally deindexed. The sad thing is that google webmaster did not say anything about it either. Everything was fine according to webmaster. Only less pages was indexed.

    Well we have fixed it now but now we have to wait and see if we get our precious ranking back. We had some 1 place rankings on some quite high-volume search-terms.

    Anyone have experience with this. If and so how long it will take to return. Or did we totally lost all our trust at goole now?

  49. I understand and will see why the meta are not showing up. (actually there are showing up but still empty)

    Thanks for your help.I wil check with our developper.

  50. Well if your homepage CMS page meta data is not showing up, it’s poorly developed by your developers. Not much I can do about it.

  51. Toni,

    Thanks for your quick answer ! I removed the default description and default title from our website and nothing is coming up. Meta tags are empty !
    My home is not a pure cms page but a XML (

  52. @laurent,

    Your homepage should be a CMS page, and you can set its meta description on CMS page level.

  53. Hi Toni,
    I am just wondering about your point 2

    If I remove the default description, I will avoid duplicate content for many pages, but I won’t have any meta description on my home page ??

    Thanks for your answer!

  54. @Web Design Malaysia :: perhaps the mouse ran out of cheese.
    I’m sorry but I can’t see any relation between your comment and the initial blogpost from Inchoo.
    Perhaps you should visit the help files from Google. Good luck.

  55. All great points, but it really is a good idea to use no index no follow until you are completely happy with the way magento is running, too many title changes in the fisrt few months will have a detrimental affect on your websites googles trust factor and this will reflect in your rankings.

  56. “I don’t want my simple products being indexed by the Search Engines”

    Tony, so after I choose visibility for simple products “Noware” they won’t be indexed by search engines? I have 5 simple associated products. All 5 have same names and descriptions.

  57. @Toni thanks for reply.

    Unfortunately both desappear of I remove it once from “default settings”.
    It’s strange and I don’t understand why.

  58. @Matteo,

    First of all that homepage title is too long, Google indexes only the first 12 words of the title.

    Why the suffix is duplicated on every single URL of the store, I have no idea. It’s most likely just a miss-configuration, go through the admin and try removing it on one place and see if both or just one disappears.

  59. Hi Toni, thanks for your article.
    I just started to manage a new site, buonoegiusto.it, but I noticed that there’s something wrong with title’s suffix. If you take a look at the title you’ll see that the site’s name is duplicated: “Buono e giusto – Buono e giusto”. How can I fix it? I put title’s suffix in Configuration ==> System ==> Design in default field. Is it right? Thanks in advance, I’m new to Magento.

  60. Thanks for this this article, it really saved my bacon!

    When I set up my store I had a real problem with my products being indexed, I had really short descriptions and google saw them all as duplicate content. Turning on rel=canonical for categories and products sorted this out for me.

  61. Martijn,

    That’s exactly where you should use rel=canonical (http to https or other way).

  62. Great suggestions. But what about NOINDEX for simple products? I would like to get rid of a bunch of duplicate content caused by Simple Products that are a part of Configurable Products but still be able to push the simple products out individually to shopping feeds/comparison feeds etc.

    But I don’t want my simple products being indexed by the Search Engines. How do I do this?

  63. Hans,

    That’s a great suggestion. I’m particularly impressed you wrote “noindex, follow” and not “noindex, nofollow”, which shows a really deep understanding of on-site SEO on your part!

  64. I’ve created an expansion on the sitemap. It also provides the image location.
    http://github.com/hans2103

    – SEO mistake and unnecessary resource sucker is allowing search engines index pages that don’t need to be indexed. TAG, Searchwords, Searchresults… and more. Use your theme local.xml to set meta tag robots noindex,follow to these pages.

  65. oh I could give you mistakes 8 to 100 🙂 The most common are:
    – leaving default favicon of Magento
    – leaving default Magento branding/content in transactional emails
    – not styling 404 page
    – not styling exceptions pages

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