Magento eCommerce is one of the hottest shopping carts at the moment and gets quite a lot of buzz, especially within the SEO world. Many are looking at Magneto as the search engine friendly alternative to OS Commerce and a quick Google Trends search between the two demonstrates that well. Recently I had an opportunity to create a new e-commerce site from the ground up, and the open source version of Magento eCommerce was selected by the client, so I thought timing is as good as it will ever get to give our first hand review of the shopping cart in terms of its SEO potential divided into available features and those lacking.

Available SEO features

1. The built-in URL re-write tool is excellent at creating search engine friendly URLs so www.sitename.co.uk/product-ID/ can become www.sitename.co.uk/product-name/.

2. Products are kept close to the root so www.sitename.co.uk/product-name/ even when the product is accessible via a directory so www.sitename.co.uk/directory/product-name/ turns to www.sitename.co.uk/product-name/.

3. Images are kept on a folder level, though not very cleanly and the image keeps its file name and alt text.

4. XML site map is available and there’s a simple priority division between product and CMS pages.

5. There’s full control over metadata in terms of page title, page description and keywords. There’s also an option to set a default metadata rule for cases when metadata was no applied and to state the type of page title separator you prefer e.g. www.sitename.co.uk/if-product-has-many-words/ or www.sitename.co.uk/if_product_has_many_word/ (I’d recommend using -).

6. Site architecture allows the engines to easily crawl the site as it’s based on www.sitename.co.uk/categoty/ and www.sitename.co.uk/product-name/ for products.

7. Product reviews are crawlable making it easier to add fresh content.

8. There’s an option to include products by RSS on a category level, making it possible to receive inbound links from subscribers.

9. Not really SEO, but still there’s an easy way to create product feeds for Google Base.

10. Enabling caching for category and product pages is easy, thereby increasing the likelihood of more pages constantly crawled.

Lacking SEO features

1. By default both the logo and the category or product titles are H1 as well, so of course you’d want to keep one H1 tag on the page.

2. Basic breadcrumb navigation is offered under some configuration, but might cause content duplication. If using Magento’s breadcrumbs be sure to test… and test again.

3. No robots txt file control by default, but there are a few extensions which can help.

5. Some htaccess work is needed to unify the domain so non www 301 to www.sitename.co.uk and www.sitename.co.uk/index.php 301 to www.sitename.co.uk otherwise you’ll have more content duplication on your hands.

6. Content duplication is a major issue with Magento and in order to prevent content duplication you should make good use of the robots file, for example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /install/
Disallow: /wishlist/
Allow: /catalogsearch/result/?q

7. Content duplication due to pagination is a major issue which could be resolved using the canonical tag or disallowing page 2, 3 etc of the same category, for example:

Disallow: /*page:*
Allow: /*page:1

8. HTML site map is not offered, but you can use the XML site map to create an HTML site map

9. When products are removed from stock or discontinued there isn’t an easy way to redirect the product to a related category or product. This can only be achieved using the htaccess file.

10. Although images are kept on a directory level, retain the file name and have alt text… all is not well and at times the image will sit behind a few directories, for example www.sitename.co.uk/directory1/sub-directory/image-id/image-name.jpg making it more difficult to get all the benefits from your images.

Putting together Chocovenyl using Magento eCommerce was challenging at times, but when you consider that the software is open source, it’s quite impressive what you get with it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 2:33 pm and is filed under e-commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.