Yoast settings for ecommerce site

[AL123al]

Hello,

I can't find the answer anywhere so I wonder if someone here could help?

The ecommerce site I have has Yoast  and Woocommerce installed.

The Post Types tab under Titles and Metas has various options:

Posts, pages, media, products, gift cards.

There is also custom post type archives for products and gift cards.

Should i noindex the media and also the custom post type archives for product and gift cards and if so why?

What about the taxonomies for ecommerce? What's best practise? Noindex?

I  understand the settings for Yoast when its not an ecommerce site but this has kind of thrown me.

Thanks

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

Let me try and help a little here.

Firstly, the main reason you won't find an answer with regards to the specifics of Yoast WordPress SEO & WooCommerce is that is the wrong question to ask to some degree. The reason for this is that every site is unique and the WordPress SEO plugin is just a tool to help deal with the typical problems we see in SEO which is largely internal duplicate content.

Lets consider a typical WordPress blog and how the tool helps there. In a single user scenario as most blogs are we have the homepage, the author page and the date archives which are going to be largely the same. So, WordPress SEO allows us to noindex or disable the author archives, to noindex the date archives and just leave the homepage with good solid unique content.

Lets apply this to tags and categories - many sites have an SEO tag and an SEO category. Using the tools in the plugin we can choose to noindex Tags so again we can cut down on that potential duplication.

So how does this apply to your site? Well, we need to identify the potential problem areas and how we can use the plugin to address those problems.

• Uniqueness / Duplication - what areas of duplication exist?
• What areas of the site are potentially low or lower quality?
• What areas of the site are not useful as search landing pages?

The tool allows you to make broad brush strokes and noindex whole categories / tags / taxonomies but it also allows for granular control in the advanced settings of each entity and allows you to noindex individual pages, set canonicals, redirections etc. Ultimately, you need to audit the site, find the problem areas and use the tools at your disposal to implement the changes that are unique to your situation.

There are areas that the tool may not be able to help fully as well and it is prudent to crawl the site and optimise for crawl efficiency. WooCommerce and most ecommerce platforms in general can generate a lot of comparison type pages that can take a site with a few thousand products up to a million URLs - this creates a quality content needle in a largely duplicate content haystack problem so be sure to take this into consideration. Webmaster tools and robots.txt can be your friends here (ignore certain URL variables, block in robots). Yoast can help here sometimes as well with some nofollows but again, you need to identify the issues specific to your own site.

I am sorry that is not a do x, y and z kind of answer but in these situations it is rarely that simple and the WordPress SEO plugin is just a tool we can use to resolve problems that are unique to the individual site.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[DennisSeymour]

Yoast has an ecommerce plugin so use that.

It has a bit more functions specifically for ecommerce sites.

To answer the 2 questions:

Should i noindex the media and also the custom post type archives for product and gift cards and if so why?

• noindex is fine

What about the taxonomies for ecommerce? What's best practise? Noindex?

- noindex is also fine

On the sites I've worked with using that setup, those worked out fine.

[AL123al]

Thanks for your help guys.