7 Common Magento SEO Mistakes

7 Common Magento SEO Mistakes

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

1. Homepage title “home”

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.” This is a very common mistake.

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 this guide on how to handle Magento layered navigation SEO issues.

7. Building a sitemap with sample products and sample categories

Check what’s in your sitemap.xml before you submit it to Google—amd avoid the sample products, if you can.