Follow-up on Magento SEO

For those that do not know Magento is a feature packed open source ecommerce  platform. It is an excellent solution for people wanting to sell their products online. However, in the support forums there has been some concern over its ability to be made SEO friendly. We covered one method which was basically to use robots.txt to avoid crawlling those portions of the site which could possibly introduce duplicate content. This partially solves this problem but it prevents the flow of pageRank from those pages so if someone has linked to one of these duplicate copy pages you won’t get any reward from this.

In February, the three major search engines agreed to implement a new attribute value canonical. This allows for a duplicate page to pass PageRank to a single version of the page. The idea is then to ensure that all duplicate content pages from product pages point to one version of the page. Within days of the announcement a canonical extension was made available to add an a canonical URL to the head of web pages.