Magento SEO
I've been working with Joachim Houtman on creating a guide to Magento SEO, much like my definitive guide to WordPress SEO. In the process we've created two modules for Magento, and an optimized blank theme!
Expect more from us on the Magento SEO front, as we develop more experience in the area together!
For now: enjoy our guide to Magento SEO!
Thanks go out to John Andrews for pre reading this article and providing us with very useful feedback!
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65 Responses to “Magento SEO”
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by Jahnelle Pittman on 18 March, 2009 at 15:12
Great guide! Well thought out, written in plain speak for the non-tech to understand, and a must read for any Magento user!
by Martijn on 18 March, 2009 at 15:38
Excellent guide. Thanks!
by Ekris on 18 March, 2009 at 16:25
Very nice written guide. I'm still looking for the best SEO optimized blog module. The one i'm using now @ AGM Accu Shop doesnt really work well with the Canonical URL's for Magento module.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
by Andrej on 18 March, 2009 at 17:52
Thank you, Joost, for this very valuable guide. Will save me a lot of work on my upcoming Magento projects, I am sure.
Best
by Chris on 18 March, 2009 at 19:20
It's about time! Thanks!!!
by Shine Marketing on 18 March, 2009 at 20:17
Looks like a good piece of work, we're already using the canonical URL's to improve the SEO benefit of an independent affiliate programme on one client site.
by Brad on 18 March, 2009 at 20:24
This is all great stuff. Where is this optimized blank theme you speak of? That peaked my interest
by Joost de Valk on 18 March, 2009 at 22:09
Hey Brad, the link is right here. :)
by Phil on 18 March, 2009 at 20:29
Joost, fantastic News to see you supporting Magento's SEO development. I've followed your WordPress work for quite some time and now look forward to your input to improve Magento.
Maybe you could help them out with their sitemaps? At the moment they include disabled products in the sitemap, which leads Google etc to 404 pages. An automated sitemap update & ping after product or CMS page changes would be really helpful too.
by Joost de Valk on 18 March, 2009 at 22:09
Hey Phil, you're right, we're adding an XML sitemap section now!
by molotovbliss on 18 March, 2009 at 20:47
Great write up! My only addition:
Don't forget to create and/or rebuild your Google Site Map's often. Especially with any significant change to your inventory, new products or categories especially.
by Joost de Valk on 18 March, 2009 at 22:08
Very true! We're adding that section while I'm typing this comment :)
by Parfume on 22 September, 2009 at 07:50
Thanks - I great guide you have made for Magento.
by Jason Mun on 18 March, 2009 at 23:59
Thank you very much! Just what I was looking for to build my site. I want more more more! =)
by Daniel on 19 March, 2009 at 03:49
Thank goodness for this blog!!! I have been waiting for this.
There is an addon for firebug that gives performance and stats that is great to see whats going on... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369
I would really like to know what js are doing what and which we can keep from loading.
- Keep up the great work!
by Ashish on 19 March, 2009 at 06:31
Very nice tips to Magento SEO. I like you google connect plugin too. Is there a way to use this plugin if i am using Disqus comments or Intense debate plugin on my site?
by Thijs van Schadewijk on 19 March, 2009 at 09:46
Great article - excellent overview. For my client http://www.pannen.nl we have found already great improvements in organic search traffic by moving to Magento as posted here (sorry Dutch only) http://www.dontblockthebox.nl/zoekmachine-optimalisatie-seo-door-magento.
However there is still much work to do and we are slowly but surely ticking off the list. This article provides a nice checklist. Many thanks!
by just Guido on 19 March, 2009 at 10:13
Found the blank theme (and the Magento SEO guide) two weeks ago on the Magento website and installed it. Nice silent launch. =)
Does the search box at the top of the blank theme look a bit off on other people's stores as well? It's like the search box overlaps the search field.
Thanks for creating another great resource. Looking forward to reading more about customizing the look and feel, so the blank theme can be a little bit less blank. ;-)
by Doug Smith on 20 March, 2009 at 17:26
Glad to see you covering some Magento topics. Ever thought about doing a WordPress and Magento integration guide?
by Hamish on 20 March, 2009 at 17:39
Joost,
You are an SEO legend!!
I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation last year at the A4U and have used your hints and tips regularly when putting WordPress sites together.
I have recently started some work with an Interspire cart and although all seems to be working well, the cost of the License together with the additional charges to update versions, it is almost prohibitively expensive.
I did try Magento first but had problems with their older version. I have just installed the recent release and all looks good so far so, with your advice, jobs a good one!!
Thanks again Joost.
Kind regards,
H
by Neil on 21 March, 2009 at 04:12
Thanks. I'm gonna start methodically working through this.
by Ossy on 21 March, 2009 at 11:19
Very well done!
Regarding the Sitemap, it would be very useful to be able to exclude individual pages/products/categories from the sitemap.
by jwill on 21 March, 2009 at 18:24
hi there, thanks for your great work?i was wondering when is your next update? as in from beta to stable.
by InternetHow on 21 March, 2009 at 19:19
Definitly will download it. Thanks
by Neil on 21 March, 2009 at 20:29
Question on www versus non-www ...
Should I always add the 301 redirect, specifying
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://mydomain.com/ [R=301,L] ## (no www.)
if I've chosen to use www under secure and unsecure?
Thanks
by rumblepup on 22 March, 2009 at 19:06
Joost, awesome Magento Guide. Brian Mark and I do the EcomPhenom Podcast and would love to have you on for an interview concerning Magento.
Also, is there a way to download the theme physically instead of through Magento Connect?
by Vanessa, Phantom CTO on 23 March, 2009 at 17:05
Thanks for the great guide on Magento SEO, you're the best person to cover the topic in depth. love it! It was just what I was looking for.
by Vincent on 24 March, 2009 at 12:12
So do you think all the RSS article importer plugins should now be updated to include the Canonical URL links of the originator?
by Joost de Valk on 24 March, 2009 at 12:14
Canonical link tags only work within the domain, so there's no use for doing it to other domains :)
by Calista on 24 March, 2009 at 15:00
Dear Joost,
very good article. I'm strongly interested in translating this article to german and put it on our blog with reference to this original. I am allowed to?
thanx, calista web solutions
by Joost de Valk on 24 March, 2009 at 15:08
Yes, you are, if you place a clear reference to the original article above and below the translation :) Good luck!
by Jerry Okorie on 24 March, 2009 at 18:17
Great post Joost, Definitely will download it. I've enjoyed reading and listening to your seminars on SEO. Thanks
by Dave Carruthers on 25 March, 2009 at 17:14
Joost what a great post, one question I have is the ironically dubbed SEO Product Sitemap that is created by default and linked to from the footer contains a list of all products.
If you use configurable products for example clothing Magento will list all the individual single products thus creating even greater Dup. Content. You can see an example here http://www.shooting-clothing.com/catalog/seo_sitemap/product/
Would appreciate your thoughts...
by Joachim on 25 March, 2009 at 21:49
Dave, I had a look at your website. I guess the problem is the type of products you use. To avoid this issue you should use a Configurable Product or Simple Product with Custom Options and not a Bundle Product. You can see examples at the Magento Demo Store or have a look at the Magento wiki
by Jake Marshall on 25 March, 2009 at 18:54
Does this mean Magento is the best ecommerce script out there?
by Joost de Valk on 25 March, 2009 at 20:28
Of the ones I've seen, yes.
by Ilya on 28 March, 2009 at 18:44
Because of your post I decided to start out with Magento. I was hoping for a more reliable solution (didn't know what to expect from it). I managed to get it up and running, but not without some difficulties. I didn't have mcrypt and also couldn't get the modern theme to work proper (still not working, resorted to the default theme and editted it...). Progress can be followed at the given url. I like the seo tips. Nice to see this much activity around this beautiful piece of websoftware.
Cheers!
by Markus on 9 April, 2009 at 08:48
thank's for this great guide.
I'm currently working on a multi-language magento project. It's not a problem to do seo for one language but I think it's getting quite complicated for more languages. Default language seems to get indexed but all outher languages are invisible to google. Language switch via cookie (i think), same urls for all languages, and so on ...
by Jason on 15 April, 2009 at 15:27
I have actually had a hard time with the 301 redirects you specified in the previous article. I have a similar rule in the root directory that works fine, but I cannot get it to work with Magento (Magento) is in a sub folder. Do you have any more information you can pass my way, maybe a copy of your .htaccess file?
by Henry on 2 May, 2009 at 10:11
Hello, thanks for this plugin
when i update the Anchor text for the Homepage in Chinese, there's character problem. i think your plugin only works with English
can you provide me a fix for it?
Thanks
by Andy on 13 May, 2009 at 20:43
thank's for this great guide.
by said026 on 19 May, 2009 at 18:20
Thanks too ^^ merci
Pingback: magento seo
by Yannick on 21 July, 2009 at 20:23
It`s a good introduction to SEO.
Thanks a Lot, it was useful.
And now I`am reading "Search Engine Optimization" by Kristopher B. Jones.
@Markus You can read here about Multi-Language solution here
by seo company on 26 July, 2009 at 21:05
Joachim thanks for this.
by Jack001 on 27 July, 2009 at 16:01
Thank you for all your work, this is a powerfull help.
I just can't do one thing the redirect from url.com/index.php to the non /index.php with:
RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/ [R=301,L]
on htaccess
this gives me a Internal Server Error...
can you help me?
regards
by Joachim on 27 July, 2009 at 17:18
This should work fine. Where do you have this rewriterule at your .htaccess? Just below ?
by Jack001 on 27 July, 2009 at 17:24
line 114:
## enable rewrites
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^url.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.url.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.url.com/ [R=301,L]
by tiago on 30 July, 2009 at 20:39
I was wondering what should be done in case of multiple stores/Languages. I'm building a English/portuguese/spanish store. When I turn on the "Add store Code to Urls" I get a nice http://www.example.com/spanish, but what should I do in the case my english store is my default?
When the "Add store Code to Urls" is set to YES, i get the following:
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/english
http://www.example.com/portuguese
http://www.example.com/spanish
Is there a way to make the english and default be the same? Does that affect my SEO?
Thank you for providing such a non-tech friendly Magento SEO tutorial.
by Andre on 22 September, 2009 at 00:30
Just take a look at this. Magento Extended Sitemap
This solves most of sitemap issues.
by Joachim Houtman on 22 September, 2009 at 09:04
I don´t think the Magento Extended Sitemap module solves a lot of issues related to SEO. Yes, their sitemaps look better than the default Magento sitemap but one of the biggest problems is the lack of categories in the product sitemap URLs.
by Andre on 22 September, 2009 at 11:24
Yes, but do you know that Magento allows you to include categories in your product URL. It's just needs to be configured in Admin panel.
by Lisa Waddington on 25 September, 2009 at 12:20
Thanks so much for posting your knowledge. I creating my first Magento site and will employ your suggestions!!
by Ahamed on 6 October, 2009 at 18:58
definitely, a great guide.
helped my business alot.
i am not the type to comment but really this post deserves some good comments.
appreciated.
THANK YOU
by Cincinnati Web Design on 8 October, 2009 at 16:25
Being that we are now offering Magento to our clients this will definitely help our SEO team! Right now we are experimenting with configurable products. The options Magento has are great! Thanx for the info and we will be checking back often for updates!
by Johan Strand on 15 October, 2009 at 21:44
Thanks for the guide!
I have a friend who says i should change the product titles in my Magento shop from plain H1
to href links, to get better SEO.
Whats you opinion on this, is it a good idea, or is it just not neccesary in magento?
Thanks,
Johan
by Waleed Mohammed on 18 October, 2009 at 05:47
Great Job!! Help alot thank you for the post!!
by Fernando on 5 November, 2009 at 01:13
Its a great Post there!
I have an question: In my store, when customers goes to secure pages and come back to unsecure, magento puts an SID on URL. I'd try an URL Rewrite but the "problem" persists.
ps. my base domain is different from secure domain because my site is in an share server, is this responsable for this problem? Another problem i have analytics reports all goals with my own referrer, may is this because different domains?
Maybe better if i buy an SSL certificate exclusive for my domain for SEO purposes?
Thanks at all
by Fernando on 5 November, 2009 at 17:03
Hello!
Just an Feedback on my previous post, i have been look this google help and added the following in your Ga.php of module Speedster GoogleAnalyticsPlus after the line:
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("' . $this->getAccount() . '");
Added:
pageTracker._setDomainName("none");
as described in this help > http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55532&ctx=sibling
So now is in test, i will report later!
Thanks!
by Ryan on 14 November, 2009 at 14:21
I don't know why but only few pages of my site is indexed by google. Google only indexed 410 pages when I have over 1500 products alone and all the while Yahoo indexed over 6000 pages. Can you please help diagnose the problem? I notice this is pretty common among magento users.
by Bart Gibby, Utah SEO Consultant on 19 November, 2009 at 18:04
Just started to learn the ins and outs of this carts since my employer has client's with Magento Carts. So far Magento seems to have a few less search engine indexing issues than other carts.
As I am new to Megento in general, I was wondering if there is a way to kill session IDs completely? I see them occasionally.
by Joachim Houtman on 20 November, 2009 at 09:27
Yes you can. You get session IDs when you link from Magento content outside the main Magento domain to another Magento page. E.g. www vs non-www and from sub-domains. Inchoo had written a post about it.
by Steve on 21 November, 2009 at 13:23
Thanks for the excellent article.
I am relatively new to Magento and SEO staff. I was a bit confused by section "1.1.1. WWW vs non-WWW". The code sample there seems to me cut and not fully visible. Could you please fix
that.
Could you recommend good manual for editing .htaccess files? It is not clear to me whether
directives RewriteBase and RewriteCond should be in one line or not?
Could you provide real working code sample for the section "1.1.1. WWW vs non-WWW"?
Thanks
by Alan on 24 November, 2009 at 13:04
Great help thanks.
by Osvaldo Spadano on 24 November, 2009 at 16:48
If a product, for instance, is set to NOINDEX then it would make no sense for it to be in the Google XML sitemap.
It would be great to be able to exclude from the sitemap all the CMS Pages and products set to NOINDEX.