This document provides an SEO guide for optimizing Magento e-commerce sites. It discusses best practices for configuration issues like redirects, URL structure, indexing dynamic pages, and turning dynamic pages into static pages. It also presents case studies showing how implementing the recommendations improved organic traffic and rankings. The guide recommends tools and modules to help with issues like image compression, caching, schema markup, retargeting, mobile sites, and XML sitemaps.

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