In this article, we have noted some common mistakes in the new Magento 2 stores and listed them down in this article. This will help you to prevent these before launching a new or upgrading an existing Magento 1.X store.

• Using Robots.txt to block layered navigation parameters. 

Using robots.txt disallow to block category pages from getting indexed by Google may not be the optimal way of handling thin content issue.  Instead, use Meta noindex, and follow on URLs with those parameters.

• txt not blocking the site search data

Google Panda algorithm penalises websites that allow the site search results to get indexed. Google wants to stop such activity. Some Magento2 websites do not block their site results. In fact, some of them actively link to their site search results from homepage, making matters worse.  If you website is dealing with these, you need to block this search results now.

• Missing availability in schema.org microdata markup for product offer

Google gets help from microdata to understand the contents of a page. It helps them figure out the price, product reviews and so on. It is also necessary feature for auto updates of products in Google Merchant Centre.

Neither SERP results will be displaying products as “In Stock” not will auto update within the Google Merchant Centre.

• Homepage with different URLs

You may have noticed that a website’s homepage can be accessed by different URLs, including the one with/without/index.php at the end as well as with/without WWW. These duplicate pages should be redirected to the canonical one. Google is smart enough to identify duplicate and near duplicate content but there is no assurance that it will select the preferred one.  Set up 301 redirects in your .htaccess file to solve the issue of duplicated homepages.

• Page title “Home page” instead of Homepage

Homepage is the most important page in term of link equity. It is therefore, not a good idea to have its tile say “Home page”. A self explanatory title is the best choice.

• Pointing layered URLs back to category with rel canonical

Rel canonical was introduced with the purpose of solving the issue of duplicate and near duplicate content. Layered filters change the content of the URL and therefore are not duplicates. If you do not want all layered filters to index, you should not use rel canonical to solve this issue.  Place meta noindex, follow on those layered URLs and thus get them out of index while allowing the link juice to flow through all the pages that you need to rank.

Most of these issues were present in Magento 1.x too. Hopefully, this will help resolve the issues.