Utilize widgets for SEO
You can use several of the widgets within Commerce's Design page to facilitate SEO.
This section includes the following topics:
Customize the Page Not Found widget
Web sites display Error 404 pages when a page cannot be found on the server, for example, if a shopper tries to access your store with a bookmarked URL for a product your store no longer carries.
Commerce uses the Page Not Found widget to display a message to the shopper that the page they searched for has not been found. (This widget is available for the Error layout.) You can benefit from adding links to other category pages within the message, for example, include deep links to the most popular collections.
Note: There is a unique URL for each of the page layouts, providing a direct link to the individual layout previews without the need to navigate from the Layout tab.
Customizing the Page Not Found widget and Error layout can help reduce site abandonment when shoppers reach your error page. Make sure the page reflects your store’s branding and includes links to other pages, such as bestselling products (see Display product recommendations for more information), the store’s home page, or important categories.
To learn how to customize layouts and widgets, see Customize your store layouts.
Utilize the Pop-up Stack widget
The Pop-up Stack widget’s modal windows appear when a user interacts with your site. Commerce's platform prevents pop-up messages or loaders from being included in the prerenders, consequently these are not shown to Googlebot or other web crawlers.
- multiple modal windows are not triggered at the same time.
- modal windows can be easily dismissed.
- the visibility of key body content on the landing pages is not obscured.
Optimize the Breadcrumbs widget
The Breadcrumbs widget is available for category and product pages, and can also be enabled for static pages. Breadcrumb navigation reflects the dependencies between pages and helps to better understand the structure of those pages, usually containing links.
Breadcrumbs should always be visible for mobile view. To improve usability, they can be moved to the bottom of the page, beneath the product/category descriptions. It is advisable to test breadcrumbs on various tablet and mobile resolutions and decide which placement works best for your site.
Optimize widgets on mobile screens
- deep menu links (for example, via drop down menus) - shoppers must be able to drill down through the category hierarchy tree
- breadcrumbs - can be allocated above/below product listings
- pagination links - infinite scroll can be added on top of numeric links to compound pages in a sequence
- page heading
- category descriptions
- product descriptions
Note: Commerce generates HTML prerenders as responsive. The same snapshot code is served to both Googlebot mobile and desktop. Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot mobile will be decisive in organic rankings. You should be aware that although the elements will be accessible for crawling for Googlebot mobile, parity between crucial page elements being rendered on both mobile and desktop must be assured.
Understand meta robot tags in widgets
Several widget types contain a default meta robot 'noindex' tag which prevents them from being indexed, but are still accessible to web crawlers. Content pages, such as wish lists, are set to 'noindex'. It is not recommended to change the directives for those subdirectories. If a page is set to 'noindex' that page will no longer be available in the search results.
You can choose between meta robots 'index,follow' and 'noindex,follow' on a per page basis, as well as revoke the default 'noindex' on a directory level.
Note: Unlike canonical tags, which provide suggestions only, a meta robots tag is a directive that is always followed by search engines.