Magento – Layered Navigation SEO

layered-navigationseo

I know this question has been asked plenty of times before, but from what I've read, no one has ever really got to the bottom of it.

Whilst this excellent post (How best can I structure product configuration for SEO?) finalises when attributes and categories should be used, what I've yet to balance is the implications of using layered navigation from a search engine optimisation perspective.

I've been using an extension from Amasty recently to help out with layered nav, and to be fair, it functions well. However an SEO associate has told me that he's pretty horrified at the number of unique URL's that layered navigation produces. I balanced that off by saying that I can set certain aspects of the layered nav to "No Follow", but he informs me that it makes no difference.

He advised me that really, all layered nav links should include a hash tag, so that search engines will categorically not even look at them. For example –

mysite.com/shoes#shopby/red

There is an extension that I've found that does this, but I'm not convinced. I would assume that if this was the case, everyone would use it, but it's from a pretty unknown developer.

I would be really grateful for any feedback on this.

Thanks

Best Answer

Old question, but in case someone fighting this issue still finds it:

One nice solution to fix the SEO issues caused by the endless number of unique URLs created by Layered Navigation is using the PRG Pattern.

Simply said, it's about replacing the GET request to a layered navigation/filter URL with a POST request (which search engine crawlers do not follow) before redirecting the user to the original layered navigation/filter URL.

This works like a charm, i. e. not changing the UX regarding Layered Navigation and 100% reliable in terms of preventing crawlers from wasting crawl budget on useless duplicate content URLs.

For further details and reading, please see

Related Solutions

Magento – Product Attributes and filtering mechanics

What I did in this case was to rewrite both the model and the corresponding resource, so first rewrite the class Mage_Catalog_Model_Layer_Filter_Attribute to be able to accept multiple values. In my case, I am using commas as a separator, so I can filter like ?my_attribute=1,2,3

In the method apply() I parse the attribute to put the different values in an array:

  public function apply(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request, $filterBlock)
    {
        $filter = $request->getParam($this->_requestVar);
        if (is_array($filter)) {
            return $this;
        }

        // MP customized
        $filter = explode(',', $filter);
        if (count($filter) < 1) {
            return $this;
        } else if ($filter == '') {
            return $this;
        }

        if (count($filter) == 1) {
            $filter = $filter[0];
        }

        if ($filter == '') {
            return $this;
        }

        if ($filter) {
            $this->_initItems();
            $this->_getResource()->applyFilterToCollection($this, $filter);
            $text = '';
            foreach ($filter as $att) {
                ($text == '') ? $text = $this->_getOptionText($att) : $text .= ', '.$this->_getOptionText($att);
            }
            if (count($filter) == 1) {
                $text = $this->_getOptionText($filter);
            }
            $this->getLayer()->getState()->addFilter($this->_createItem($text, $filter));
        }
        // End MP customized
        return $this;
      }

Then in the file Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Layer_Filter_Attribute you have to make sure that you are able to filter for multiple values in your query, so I rewrote the following method like this:

     public function applyFilterToCollection($filter, $value)
    {
        $collection = $filter->getLayer()->getProductCollection();
        $attribute  = $filter->getAttributeModel();
        $connection = $this->_getReadAdapter();
        $tableAlias = $attribute->getAttributeCode() . '_idx';
        $conditions = array(
            "{$tableAlias}.entity_id = e.entity_id",
            $connection->quoteInto("{$tableAlias}.attribute_id = ?", $attribute->getAttributeId()),
            $connection->quoteInto("{$tableAlias}.store_id = ?", $collection->getStoreId()),
            $connection->quoteInto("{$tableAlias}.value IN (?)", $value)
        ); // Added IN (?) notation for arrays


        $collection->getSelect()->join(
            array($tableAlias => $this->getMainTable()),
            join(' AND ', $conditions),
            array()
            // MP Need distinct here to avoid getting the same config product from
            // different basic products when filtering for different values
            // in the same attribute
        )->distinct(true);

        return $this;
    }

Magento – Changing advanced search results query – Magento 2

We studied such an option to allow multiple selection of filters while writing ElasticSuite.

The override should be in :

\Magento\CatalogSearch\Model\Layer\Filter\Attribute::_getItemsData() (URL Generation in which you should set value to the imploded value)
\Magento\CatalogSearch\Model\Layer\Filter\Attribute::apply (explode the value of the filter).

Then you need to fix the DI. Take cares it is located into the frontend area. You can read a full example here :

https://github.com/Smile-SA/elasticsuite/blob/master/src/module-elasticsuite-catalog/etc/frontend/di.xml

You may also encounter some SQL, SolR or ES problem to handle the array.

We have renounced to it since we do not use option ids but labels and it was a nightmare to handle multivalued this way. You can see the result here (looks likes your problem). : http://demo.magento-elastic-suite.io/index.php/women/tops-women.html?style_general%5B0%5D=Tee&style_general%5B1%5D=Pullover.

Hope it's help.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Magento – Product Attributes and filtering mechanics

Magento – Changing advanced search results query – Magento 2

Related Topic