seo
While the ultimate goal is to get your blog to the highest positions, not all blog pages need to be visible in search results. In both cases though you need meta robots or robots meta tags.
So, today you'll learn what meta robots are and how to add them without any coding, using only the
.But first, let's define what these robots are and why you need them.
What are Meta Robots?
Meta robots or robots meta tags are the directives added to the HTML of the page. They tell web crawlers what they can or can't do on a certain page. In other words, they tell web crawlers how to crawl and index a page in search results.
You can't see meta robots since they are added to the page's <head>, code part.
Nonetheless, you need them to define:
- whether a page appears in the search results
- whether crawlers should follow links on a page
- whether a snippet of a page should be displayed in SERP
- whether images on a page are indexed
Note: Shopify blog meta robots are always INDEX, FOLLOW by
Keeping your blog active and relevant is quite a task. Thus, you may often need to disable some posts or update URLs. But here is the twist: your customers will get 404 error pages if you don't redirect customers from the old URLs. Needless to say, it harms both the user experience and your SEO efforts.
Thus, you must create 301 redirects to ensure a smooth ride. Today, you'll find out how to create automatic blog URL redirects in the
extension.Auto Redirects for Deleted/Disabled Entities
In the Magento 2 Blog, the 301 redirects for deleted or disabled blog entities are created automatically. You get this functionality out of the box and don't have to take any extra steps to set it up manually.
The readers are redirected in the following way:
- Blog author > blog index page
- Blog tag > blog index page
- Blog post > blog index page
Auto Redirects for Changed Blog URLs
When you change some blog entity URL, the process of creating an automatic redirect is slightly different.
Whether you disable, delete or change Shopify Blog URLs, you don't want readers to end up on the 404 pages. This badly influences your visitors' experience and makes your Shopify blog SEO efforts go in vain. Not the best scenario.
Thus, to avoid this, you need to create blog URL redirects in Shopify. So, today you'll learn how to create URL redirects for the Shopify Blog App by Magefan.
Auto Redirects for Disabled/Deleted Entities
Whenever you disable or remove some blog posts, categories, tags and authors, the Magefan Blog app creates automatic redirects. Here's how readers are redirected based on a page they try to access:
- Blog post > category > root category > blog homepage
- Blog category > parent category > root category > blog homepage
- Blog author > blog homepage
- Blog tag > blog homepage
You don't need to enable or create anything since redirects from disabled or deleted blog entities are enabled automatically.
Auto Redirects on Blog URL Change
The other case when you need to create
A blog sitemap plays a vital role in your page rankings. If it is not configured correctly your blog pages won't be crawled, indexed and ranked properly. Since our Shopify Blog App allows you to configure blog sitemap in a few clicks, all you need to do is submit it to search engines.
However, if you don't want some pages to be crawled and indexed, you simply need to exclude them from the sitemap. And you'll learn how to do that in this article.
Note: this feature is available in the Pro plan.
To exclude pages from the Shopify blog sitemap:
1. Go to Apps > Magefan Blog > Posts and choose a blog post you'd like to exclude from the sitemap.
2. Find the General settings section and switch the Exclude from XML Sitemap option to Yes.
3. Save a blog post, go to the blog sitemap and check if a post is removed from it.
Note: the Exclude from XML Sitemap option is available for blog posts, category and tag pages, so you can exclude these pages from the blog sitemap if you like.
Once you
XML sitemap is one of the most important SEO concepts that helps to get your pages crawled and indexed. Think of it as a roadmap for search robots who need to discover new "routes" (pages) while crawling your website.
As you might know, Shopify generates a sitemap.xml file with all the product images, pages and collections automatically. However, in our Shopify Blog App we have our custom blog XML sitemap and in this guide, you'll learn how to find and configure it.
How to Find Shopify Blog Sitemap?
Your blog sitemap will always be available via the following path by default:
https://your-shopify-domain.com/a/blog/sitemap.xml
Note: if you've changed your app proxy — /a/blog/ — the sitemap path will be different.
Once you find your blog sitemap you can submit it to Google and other search engines.
Google Search Console Throws Errors
Sometimes it happens that Google Search Console can read your sitemap but has errors. Most often it happens because you use your admin domain in the URLs.
Creating great content is not always enough to get ranked high in search. Except for the SEO-optimized content, you need to configure blog sitemap, canonical tags, breadcrumbs, metadata, rich snippets, etc. Shopify blog URL structure is also one of the important factors to pay attention to.
Our Shopify Blog App offer you very flexible URL settings. So you can create SEO-friendly blog URLs. Today we'll discuss how you can configure blog URLs and change them when needed.
Note: the option to change blog pages paths is available in the Standard and Pro plans.
Blog URL Structure
To configure the Shopify Blog URL structure:
1. Navigate to Apps > Magefan Blog > Configuration and scroll down to the Permalink Settings section and set the Blog Route.
Note: if you want to keep the /a/blog/ path in the blog URLs you can leave Blog Route empty.
2. Define Post Path Schema. Available variables here: {
{parent_category}}, { {id}}, { {year}}, { {month}}, { {url_key}}.e.g. some examples
With thousands of blog posts appearing on the web monthly, simply writing good content is not enough to lure more readers in. You need to come up with something to set your content apart from others in search results. Fortunately, Google and other search engines have already introduced that "something". It is structured data.
Except for the BlogPosting article schema our Blog extension already adds to the blog posts by default there is also a HowTo structured data. While the former merely tells Google that your content is a blog post, the latter makes your blog post eligible for rich results.
Today, you'll learn what exactly is HowTo schema markup, why you need it for your blog posts in Magento and how to add them easily with no coding skills.
What is HowTo Structured Data?
HowTo is a special type of structured data that helps you to define your content as a how-to, especially if your blog posts provide a set of steps for completing a task (including text, images and videos).
Structured data helps you to communicate some additional information about your blog post to the search engine. It provides more details about your blog posts and helps search robots to determine whether your post fits to be featured in a snippet.
Although our Magento 2 Blog already has all of the required structured data implemented, you don't have to stop there. Today we want to teach you how to add FAQ schema in Magento Blog to benefit from better indexing and provide tremendous value to your blog readers.
You don't need to edit any templates or dive deep into the code. You simply need Magento 2 Rich Snippets extension.
So, here we go.
To add FAQ schema in Magento blog post:
1. Navigate to Content > Blog > Posts and find the blog post you want to add the FAQs for.
2. Click on the space where you want to add FAQs and select Widgets.
3. Select FAQ by Magefan as a Widget type.
4. Choose the
Our
is a robust marketing tool that allows you to promote your products and build a community around your brand. And although it offers you a lot of SEO features, internal blog links are not something the module can cover for you.According to the Magento SEO guide, linking relevant pages together will pass the link juice across these pages. But not only that. It also improves customers' experience and helps search robots to understand your website structure better.
So, in this article, you'll learn how to add links across multiple blog posts in literally a few clicks. You'll need to resort to the Magento 2 SEO solution to configure automatic internal links in the blog.
To enable automatic internal links in Magento 2 Blog:
1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > SEO > Cross Links and make sure Magefan Blog Post Content is selected to be used for Auto Cross Links.
2. Go to Marketing > Seo&Search > Cross Links and press the Add Cross Link
Magento 2 Canonical Meta Tags are tags used in the HTML code of the page in order to define the original content URL to avoid duplication issues.
That is why it is important to set canonical tags for your Magento Blog pages to improve your blog SEO.
In order to use canonical meta tags for your blog pages navigate to Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > Blog and find the Search Engine Optimization section. There choose pages you want to Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For.
Once you finish don't forget to Save Config. As an alternative, you can enable canonical tags for blog and other website pages as part of the Magento 2 SEO Extension.
Getting Google to discover your blog pages is easy. You just need to upload your sitemap to Google Search Console and make sure blog pages are not blocked in the robots.txt file. But that's not quite it.
You also have to make sure crawlers can index and display these pages in search engines. That's what robots meta tags are for.
So, today you'll learn how to set robot meta tags for your blog using the Magento meta robots guide.
extension. We won't stop on the directives here, so explore them in ourDefault Robots Meta Tags
Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > Blog to find default meta robots settings for the Author's page.
The same option is available for Tag and Search pages here.
Once you set the default robots for the blog tag, author, and search pages, they will be included before the head closing tag in the page HTML.
Note: use the Ctrl+U combination or Inspect browser tools to check the blog robots meta tags.
The only drawback of the default
Sitemap is one of the most important things when it comes to website indexing and crawling. The same is true for your Magento 2 blog sitemap. If you want your content to be discovered by the search robots, you need to configure the blog sitemap.
So, today you'll learn everything you need to know about the sitemap in Magento 2 Blog to ensure proper content indexing.
Configure Magento 2 Blog Sitemap
Once you install the Magento 2 Blog Extension, the blog XML sitemap is generated automatically together with the regular Magento XML sitemap. You don't have to do anything.
Note: in all blog versions before 2.11.0, a separate blog sitemap is generated. It is available via the same path as your Magento sitemap, but with the blog_ or pub/blog_ suffix, like in the https://domain.com/blog_sitemap.xml.
Configure Frequency and Priority of Indexing
If you use Blog Plus or Blog Extra editions of the Blog extension you can change the priority and frequency of the blog items indexing in the
Your store position in Google or other search engines depends on your SEO strategy. There are a lot of factors SEO is based on and even more things that depend on SEO, website traffic in particular.
Magento 2 Blog is one of the best ways to drive more traffic to your website. So we added the best SEO practices to our Blog Extension to make your blog pages rank.
And in this article, you're going to learn about blog permalink settings — SEO-friendly blog URLs.