Question About Woo-commerce Store and SEO Best Practice

[kimsal]

I need your help please, SEO experts!

I am building a woo store and I have a line of products that contains only 5 products, each product has a different name in my niche. These products can be customized into different themes, so basically I have around 50 themes that can be applied to each product and this is actually my USP (unique selling point).

For easy user experience, I thought about creating 5 product categories for each product and use attributes to create those themes then assign them to products, this way the customer can enter any product category he wants and filter by the theme he prefers.
After reading many articles about woo-commerce product attributes (which usually used to filter products by colors and sizes) almost all articles emphasize the importance of adding a NOINDEX tag to the attributes and their pages for the simple reason that Google will consider them as a duplicate content.
An example from an article I read:

While faceted navigation can be useful for users, by helping them find what they are looking for quickly, it can also be problematic when it comes to crawling. Each selectable option can generate a new URL on the website by adding parameters such as colour or size. For example, the following pages would look very similar to search engines:
***com/category
***com/category?colour=blue
***com/category?colour=blue&size=small
***com/category?colour=blue&size=small&order=price-asc
Having just 5 unique filtering options could generate as many as 3,125 different URLs per category page depending on how your faceted navigation is setup. Stopping search engines from crawling these additional pages is relatively simple, only requiring two changes:
Use nofollow on all facet links
Deploy meta robots or x-robots noindex, nofollow on all additional pages

My goal is not only to create a good user experience but also to rank those themed pages, for instance; ***com***/theme/nature***
Where "theme" is the attribute name and "nature" is the attribute term. So if I added a NOINDEX tag to the attribute pages I will lose my entire unique selling point in the store.

The second option is creating those theme as a product sub-category, but in this case, it will be a serious case of duplicate content, for example:
***com**/product-category/product_1/theme-nature
***com**/product-category/product_2/theme-nature
In this case, each product category will have the same sub-category, which doesn't make any sense!

My question is that how can I create a good user experience and also help my whole store to comply with SEO good practice? And stay away from duplicate content.

Thank you and sorry for my long post as I needed to explain my whole situation.

[not2easy]

Hi kimsal and welcome to WebmasterWorld. The best practice would be to index one product URL for each product. With careful content writing, these products may rank for their various themes. With only 5 products, it should not be a major task to write content that highlights their relation to each theme in one page. Creating various themes (URLs) and trying to rank for each theme separately may cause more distress than success. If your platform creates multiple URLs for each product, use noindex for all but one as recommended.

There have been a few recent discussions on this topic - to read those, see (Sep 30, 2019): [webmasterworld.com...] or newer(Oct 16, 2019): [webmasterworld.com...]

One older thread has solid information as well though the additional URLs are due to WordPress structure rather than Woo Commerce, this from 2014: [webmasterworld.com...]

[kimsal]

Thank you not2easy for the quick reply, I will check the links you shared,
I agree on using one optimized product page but in my case, each theme will have various varieties of designs, so basically I should showcase all those designs and eventually will have to optimize those product pages individually

[tangor]

@kimsal ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Write your five products as 50 products, each one different, (and content to explain why) ... or have five products presented with 10 attributes on each product page.

G will find all and present as necessary. I believe you are over thinking this. You do NOT have 50 products, you have 5 products with 10 attributes!

Simplify your time and coding!

[kimsal]

I agree with you that I overcomplicated this subject and took from me so much time in research, anyway, I have 50 attributes "themes" at least, each theme has at least 10 different designs :D, so I guess i will end up with at least 500 products that's why I needed to use filters!
After reading "not2say" recommended links and looked into includes/widgets/class-wc-widget-layered-nav-filters.php code, I found that woo-commerce already put a rel=nofollow in all URLs that contain attributes filters parameters which is basically a good step. Many recommends adding a noindex in robot.txt to those search parameters URL, but i guess i will add the NOINDEX tag with NOFOLLOW inside the widget code, since it's already nofollowing those links that change every time with users

[kimsal]

what do you think about adding the NOINDEX tag?
as for creating as many product pages as I need, I have no problem because my themes have different topics and I would like to have more chance to rank for as much as possible terms in my products niche

[not2easy]

Many recommends adding a noindex in robot.txt

While noindex can be helpful, it does not belong in robots.txt. You can use a metatag such as:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive"> 

in the html headers or as x-robots elements within directories or URL structures via .htaccess. If you block directories or URL structures in robots.txt then Google will not be able to know that they are noindexed. Make sure that noindexed URLs are not submitted in your sitemaps.

[kimsal]

Thank you Not2Easy, one last question please just to clarify your answer. How can I add those tags as URL structures via .htaccess?
I am afraid to mess with codes there. and I believe this is the best ay to do it because adding tags to the HTML headers will take so much time as I have a lot URLs combinations

[not2easy]

Hi kimsal, there are some general 'how-to' suggestions for adding to htaccess in that one thread I linked to for ideas: [webmasterworld.com...]

A note about .htaccess edits - this is the Google SEO forum, so not where most discussions of .htaccess are found. Those belong in the Apache server forum: [webmasterworld.com...] but you should know that any header or x-robots modifications should be before your sitewide rewrite rules that you may have in place for canonicalization or WordPress.

[kimsal]

Ok got it, thanks a lot and I am already glad I joined this forum as the community is awesome and helpful, thank you again and have an awesome day