WooCommerce filter by/order by pages being crawled by Google

  • Selah

    (@tubescreamer)


    6 months, 2 weeks ago

    Hi, is it best practice to have URLs that filter products by attributes etc. be crawled by Google? For example: https://example.com/phones/?filter_brand=samsung&query_type_brand=or

    I have a few of these filter pages showing up in Google and it’s a bit messy, because they all have the same meta title (though i’ve changed that recently with some PHP, making it dynamically change the SEO meta title based on the selected attributes, though i’m not sure if that will show on Google), as well as there’s no way for me to change the meta descriptions of these pages. So i’m not sure if it’s recommended to have Google crawl these pages or not. Part of me feels like it would be useful, because then I can start ranking for really specific searches, maybe? For example, now that I made the change to dynamically change the SEO titles based on the filtered attributes, my SEO title may now be something like “Shop Pre-Owned iPhones in (Country/Location)”. This is essentially what my title would look like if I selected the ‘Phones’ category, and filtered by Brand “Apple” and Product Condition “Pre-Owned”.

    • This topic was modified 6 months, 2 weeks ago by Selah.
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  • Hi @tubescreamer,

    Thank you for reaching out to us with your query. It’s great to hear that you’re taking proactive steps to manage how your product filters appear in Google search results. Having URLs that filter products by attributes crawled by Google can be beneficial for SEO, as it allows you to rank for specific searches related to those attributes. However, it’s important to manage these pages carefully to avoid issues such as duplicate content, which can negatively impact your SEO.

    Since you’ve already implemented dynamic changes to the SEO meta titles based on selected attributes, that’s a great start! To ensure these changes are reflected on Google, you might need to wait for Google to re-crawl your pages. This process can take some time.

    Regarding the meta descriptions, WooCommerce doesn’t natively support different meta descriptions for filtered pages, but this can be managed with SEO plugins that allow control over your SEO settings. Here are a few steps you can take to further optimize your filter pages for SEO:

    1. Use Canonical Tags: Ensure that canonical tags are used correctly on your filtered pages to point to the main category page. This helps Google understand which pages are primary and should be indexed.
    2. Robots.txt: You can use the robots.txt file to control the crawling of certain parameters. For example, you might decide to disallow crawling of certain filter combinations that don’t add value to your SEO.
    3. Google Search Console: Use Google Search Console to monitor how these pages are indexed and to submit new pages for crawling after making changes.

    To address the issue of meta descriptions, you might consider using a plugin like ‘Yoast SEO’ or ‘All in One SEO Pack’, which are available on our products page. These plugins offer features that could help you set up templates for meta descriptions even for dynamically generated pages.

    Let us know if there’s anything else we can help you with.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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