This SEO Plugin Just Changed Ecommerce Forever!
Struggling with meta robots and canonical tags in your WooCommerce store? In this video, you’ll learn the perfect SEO settings for category and product-centric shops, including how to control link juice, crawler budget, and indexing with just one click. Discover SEOLAXY’s powerful plugin suite that simplifies complex SEO tasks and boosts your Google rankings effortlessly.
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“This SEO Plugin Just Changed Ecommerce Forever!” Transcript
Intro
Have you ever tried to set up the meta robots and canonical tags to the right values from an SEO perspective for categories, subcategories, their pagination, filter, and sorting views?
If you have succeeded in it, you already know that the impact of setting them in the perfect way results in big organic traffic spikes due to much better rankings. It is always worth the effort.
But setting them for example for some category level paginations to “noindex, follow” with self referencing canonical tags and lower category levels to “noindex, nofollow” with canonical tags pointing to category pages is very difficult in any CMS.
Controling the link juice flow through an online store, as well as crawler and indexing budget became even more important for ranking in LLMs and Google's AI overviews and the new AI mode.
In this video I will show you what the perfect settings are and how to set them up with just one click and get better Google rankings and therefore more sales. Yes, just in one click.
We have worked 2 years on a plugin to remove ourselves and you from the headaches that arise from this topic. Before I show you how it exactly works, you should know that most probably you have been setting the wrong meta robots and canonical tag settings for online stores and that this video will open your eyes to how you should set it up, why exactly in that way, and how easy it can be.
I will show you the perfect settings for meta robots and canonical tags we are using for our clients and the plugin you can use as well.
Category-Centric vs. Product-Centric Stores: Understanding Your SEO Needs
But first, let me show you two different types of online stores so you know what the right settings should be.
The most common type of online stores are category centric ones. Their categories and subcategories have more search volume than their products, therefore their categories and subcategories should be given more internal link juice. Such stores are for example lamp stores, furniture stores, rug stores, tile stores, and curtain stores.
The keyword for the category “Sectional sofa” has way more search volume than all products of it combined, because they have generic names like “ComfortMax 3000.”
The second type of online stores are product centric stores. Their categories and subcategories have way less search volume than their products combined, therefore their products should be given more internal link juice. Such stores are for example book stores, mobile phone stores, laptop stores, game stores, and sneaker stores.
One book like “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” has three times more SV than the category “fantasy books.”
Mastering Pagination URLs and Advanced Link Juice Control
Typically online stores list all products of subsubcategories (so called lvl3 categories) in their subcategories (so called lvl2 categories) and all products of the subcategories in their categories (so called lvl1 categories).
If that is the case and the online store shows a normal product listing in their lvl1 categories and not only thumbnails of lvl2 subcategories, we need to set the pagination URLs of lvl1 categories to noindex, follow.
Why? We don’t want pagination URLs in the index, but we want the Googlebot to find all our products as soon as possible and give them link juice from lvl1, because in that way they will get the most link juice and will be faster indexed.
The lvl1 category pagination URLs can be set to a self referencing canonical or to the lvl1 category as a canonical. If we have a category centered shop, we should point the canonical to the category to give the category more link juice. If we have a product centered shop, the canonical should be set to self referencing to give products more link juice. Logical, isn’t it?
Now let’s see what about lvl2 category pagination pages. If we have a category centered shop we will set the meta robots tags to noindex, nofollow and the canonical to the lvl2 category. Why? Because those products don’t need more link juice and are already discovered by the Googlebot.
If it’s a product centered shop, it is better to set the meta robots tags to noindex, follow with a self referencing canonical, so products will get even more link juice.
The same is true for lvl3 and lvl4 categories if they exists. In that way we can truly control the flow of the link juice and push the rankings for our most important pages even more.
Filter URLs Strategy
But what with category filter URLs?
There it gets complicated. Usually we want single filter URLs in the index, but multiple filter URLs not. So we handle them the same as categories, but their paging URLs again like lvl2 categories, depending on the shop type. That’s even more link juice to the right URLs and more link juice control.
Googlebot loves when they see this, because it makes it clear what we want and in some cases we don’t waste Google's processing power and save electricity and therefore money for Google. And who doesn’t love if you save them money or explain clearly what you want from them?
Not having multiple filters on “noindex,nofollow” can be an expensive mistake, because they can create so called infinite loops.
By sticking to this strategy you will strenghten single filter URLs and have a huge advantage to competitors and increase your chances to have better long-tail rankings and to be listed as sources in AI overviews and Google's AI mode, especially for category centered shops.
In some cases you want to set some multiple filter URLs on index, but usually you need to be a magician to do that in most CMSs. But we have you covered, the second plugin I will show you later, can do exactly that.
The Importance of Hiding Category Sorting URLs from Googlebot
But what about category sorting URLs?
We don’t want them in the index, we should hide them from the Googlebot to see them to save link juice, and both crawler and indexing budget. But if you haven’t set that up, we don’t want to waste those three valuable currencies, so they should be set to "noindex, nofollow" with canonicals to the category page, no matter which type of online store you have.
I must admit, all this together is complicated and can get confusing.
The One-Click Solution for Perfect SEO Settings
But the solution can be easy and I will show you how it can be done with just one click.
So what are the perfect settings for those two types of online stores?
Here is an overview of all the meta robots and canonical settings you should have depending on the shop type you manage. The left row is for category centered shops and the right one for product centered shops.
You can try to set it up in your CMS, it is doable for every CMS with a lot of custom tweaks. But if you are using WooCommerce I have great news for you!
We have developed a plugin just for that and it is so simple, you won’t believe it. You just need to press one button and you are done!
It’s called SEOLAXY Link Juice Control, it can be downloaded at plugins.seolaxy.com and looks like this.
This is the first and only screen you see after you activate the plugin. You just check this checkbox which confirms that you know what you are doing. Select if you want more link juice to categories or products and click save. That’s it. Done!
You now have the perfect SEO settings for meta robots and canonical tags in your WooCommerce online store. It doesn’t get simpler and easier!
Install the plugin, choose your preference and click on SAVE. Now lean back for two weeks and watch your rankings improve.
For those who want to adjust it differently, there is a third column, where you can set custom settings if you want to. I don’t recommend using it, but if you know what you are doing, you can use it.
If you have the wrong settings, which is almost always true, by activating this WooCommerce plugin you will see a big SEO shift in just 14 days. If you use all three SEOLAXY WooCommerce SEO plugins with the right settings, you my dear friend have a real SEO magic weapon in your hands.
You can download them at plugins.seolaxy.com, we have also a 90-day money-back guarantee. So if you don’t see a positive SEO impact on your WooCommerce online store, we will give you the money back without asking any questions.
We are planning to release the same SEO plugins for Shopify. If you don’t want to miss them out, subscribe to a free SEOLAXY newsletter at seolaxy.com
We have been using them on our clients’ online stores for two years now and they work great with most WooCommerce templates and plugins. Make sure to turn off meta robots and canonical tag handling in other plugins you are using.
If you want to play with the multiple filter options I mentioned earlier and get more crawler budget control, try the SEOLAXY Crawler Budget Control plugin out.
You always get three SEOLAXY plugins for the price of two, so if you need the Link Juice and the Crawler Budget Control plugin, and you do, you will get the CTR Optimization plugin for free, which will save you a lot of time and enables you to optimize your CTR with patterns.
Visit plugins.seolaxy.com and take a look. We are looking forward to your feedback and success stories.
In the next video I will show you how the other two plugins work, why they are so important and how to set them up perfectly. See you in the next one!
