Most SEO advice is written for content sites and transfers poorly to stores, which have problems content sites do not: thousands of near-identical pages, filters generating infinite URLs, and inventory that disappears.
Faceted navigation, the big one
Filters generate URLs. Colour, size, price and brand combined produce thousands of addresses, most of them near-duplicates with thin content. Left unmanaged, crawlers spend their budget on those instead of your products.
- 01Decide which filter combinations deserve to be indexed. Usually one dimension with real search demand, such as a colour or a brand.
- 02Canonical the rest to the unfiltered category.
- 03Block genuinely worthless parameters, such as sort order and view mode, in robots.txt.
- 04Never link to filtered URLs from navigation you want crawled deeply.
Duplicate product content
If you sell products other retailers also sell, and you all use the manufacturer's description, none of you has unique content. The one that ranks is the one with the most authority, which is usually the largest marketplace.
The fix is genuinely writing something: what it is good for, who it suits, what it does not do. Fifty words of original text on your best sellers is worth more than a rewrite of the whole catalogue.
Out-of-stock and discontinued products
| Situation | Do this |
|---|---|
| Temporarily out of stock | Keep the page live. Show availability and offer a notify option |
| Permanently discontinued, replacement exists | 301 to the replacement |
| Discontinued, no replacement, has traffic | Keep the page, explain, link to the category |
| Discontinued, no traffic, no links | 410 and remove from the sitemap |
Deleting a ranking product page and returning a 404 discards search value that took years to earn. This is a common and expensive habit.
Pagination
Category pages beyond page one need to be crawlable but should not compete with page one. Keep them indexable with self-referencing canonicals, and ensure every product is reachable within a few clicks. Infinite scroll with no paginated URLs behind it means most of your catalogue is invisible.
Speed, because it is a store
Category and product pages carry the most third-party scripts on any site: reviews, recommendations, chat, upsells. Each was justified individually. Together they are usually the reason mobile is slow, and mobile is where the revenue is.
Priority order
- 01Fix faceted navigation. Largest impact, most commonly ignored.
- 02Get out-of-stock handling right. Stops you destroying value routinely.
- 03Write original copy on the products that matter.
- 04Then speed, then everything else.
Working on something like this?
We build websites, stores and custom applications, and we will tell you honestly if the thing you are describing does not need one.