Should I Use WooCommerce Tags & Attributes?
-
I'm helping an online furniture store search engine optimize a WooCommerce store and I'm trying to make sure our taxonomies make sense. I'd love any help you guys can give, but I'm particularly interested in determining whether we should use tags. Product attributes make sense to me, but I'm concerned to use tags because of the propensity for creating duplicate content. Thanks in advance for any help you guys are willing to give.
-
Hi Justin,
Sorry for the late reply here. Yes, I likely would do that. As long as the site categories are set up properly, you shouldn't require any product attribute pages to make a product discoverable for Googlebot. And the pa_ attribute pages tend to make for a poor landing page experience. If a product/attribute combination is especially important or profitable, I'd usually set up a custom landing page for that, rather than rely on the product attribute archive pages.
-
Quick question on this...
For product attributes in Woocommerce, like pa_color, would you put
Disallow: /pa_* to keep all attribute pages from being crawled via robots.txt?
-
Hi Chad,
First off, you're right to be thinking about adding product attributes for the size, colour, etc. You should definitely do this.
I wouldn't recommend tags unless there's a strong reason to use them. Tags can be of genuine use on a blog, by providing users a way to navigate a group of related posts, without the blog author having to devote a whole category to it. But eCommerce sites, depending on their size, can already have a pretty difficult time with duplicate content, and it's hard to see how tags would improve the user experience more than tightly-focused subcategories.
If you have a category called "beds", for example, it makes more sense for "double beds" to be a subcategory within that, than to be its own tag. WooCommerce does support nested subcategories, which should allow you to get pretty granular if needs be. You can make use of breadcrumb navigation this way as well.
Finally, on the subject of product attributes again, note that WooCommerce adds attribute filters to the URL as a parameter. So if searched for double beds on your site, the URL would resemble the following:
yoursite.com/beds/double-beds/?min_price=250&max_price=600
You should make sure you've got rel=canonical in place. Also, given that your client is a search engine, I imagine they'll have quite a lot of product pages. To help Google use their crawl budget efficiently, you might add some lines like the following to the robots.txt file, so Googlebot doesn't try to crawl any commonly-used parameters:
Disallow: ?min_price=
Disallow: ?max_price=
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Dynamic links & duplicate content
Hi there, I am putting a proposal together for a client whose website has been optimised to include many dynamic links and so there are many pages with duplicate content: only the page title, h1 and URL is different. My client thinks this isn't an issue. What is the current consensus on this? Many thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | lorraine.mcconechy0 -
How To Place A Last Updated Tag
Hi All, I hope this is something you can help me with. My website is running wordpress and I post frequently. However I do update a lot of my posts over time to keep them relevant. I would like to add in the last updated tag into my posts to clearly indicate this to the search engines. Is this best placed manually or does anyone know of a plugin which can take care of this is a smart manner. Thanks In Advance
On-Page Optimization | | pettreats0 -
Can you use the canonical tag and rel=next and rel=prev on category pages.
We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are. Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
H1 tag in wordpress
Hi there! I'm having problems to locate the h1 tag in wordpress (in each page) in order to optimize the pages for SEO. When introducing text it starts with h2. Where can I locate it? Thanks in advanced.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Regarding the META KEYWORDS tag
Two questions regarding the META KEYWORDS tag: Does Google actually penalize you for using the KEYWORD META tag, or does it just ignore it? On a related matter, I've noticed that when I use the On-Page Optimization Tool, it indicates that my header includes the KEYWORD tag, although I've taken great pains to remove keywords from pages that had been optimized by a previous SEO. I'm using Magento - Could it be a legacy issue? Would that make a difference?
On-Page Optimization | | RScime250 -
Alt attributes same as jpg name and keywords?
Hi everyone, Quick question: Is it better to have your jpg name and alt text slightly different to your keywords for that particular page, or is it better to have them slightly differently? At the minute I'm doing them all with a variation on the keyphrase I want to optimize for (long tail and all that...). Any input much appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | CMoore850 -
Title tag - shorter = better?
Is it true that the shorter the Title tag is the more powerful the keywords in it are?
On-Page Optimization | | echo1
I know that the main keywords have to be at the beginning of the title but, having more words in your Title could dilute the effectiveness of your main keywords? Ex: Dallas limo service | Private car by SelectLimousine. Could the fact that I have a second part of my title affect the first part by diluting its value? I would like to rank first for Dallas car service but also for Dallas car service and Dallas limousine service. Is this good practice?0 -
Potential Duplicate Title Tags On Sibling Pages
Edit I'll take the fall on this one, seems I could have asked my quesiton in a more clear manner. I was cruising other questions and finding a whole of answers that I suspect were not truly intended to help, but maybe help and earn Mozpoints. Wasn't fair of me to label those answering here with that. I will work better on the wording of my questions! 🙂 Edit Either I am asking my question poorly or I am learning there may be a rush to get points by throwing up any old answer...it very well may be the former which I am open to feedback on. Each page is to stand alone and hopefully rank well for the neighbourhood name and in conjunction with another relevant keyword phrase. There is no 'duplicate' version of any pages. * On a site there are numerous pages that provide real estate listings broken down by neighbourhood. Each containing similar content, a abbreviated version of the listings, often spanning 2 or 3 pages. These are 3rd level pages. Properties->Calgary Neighbourhoods->Evanston The title tags created are: Evanston Homes For Sale - NW Calgary Real Estate Panorama Hills Home For Sale - NW Calgary Real Estate Etc. for about 15 or so pages. Then they start again for another area of the city: Sagewood Homes For Sale - Airdrie Real Estate Woodside Homes For Sale - Airdrie Real Estate At this point there is no text on the actual page outside of the listings...an example of similar listings on another site - http://www.experiencerealtygroup.com/BaturynandDunluceHomes.ubr Do you think the SE's will see these as 'proper' use of the Title Tag or duplicate or other practices they tend to frown upon? It is a logical way of creating the title and obviously creating a unique version for each page would not only be tough to scale on some sites with 100's of these pages, they would become a little silly and not much use to the searcher in the SERPs Thanks for any help!
On-Page Optimization | | kyegrace1