Should I Use WooCommerce Tags & Attributes?

[cbizzle]

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.

[StephanSolomonidis]

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=

[JustinMurray]

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?

[StephanSolomonidis]

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.