Advice on Yoast Plugin please

Puzzled about Yoast reporting

[Kerrya]

I've been using Yoast plugin for WordPress and Woocommerce and there are several points I just don't understand.

1) It keeps telling me I have no internal links when Woocommerce automatically adds three related products to the page automatically. I have the paid upgrade to Woocommerce, so I don't understand why these links don't satisfy Yoast.

2) It keeps telling me that I don't have 300 words of copy as if my product listings were blog posts. Surely they must know the difference between a blog post and a product. (my competitors even don't have large copy and they are some of the largest eComm sites anywhere.)

3) Most of my products have 20ish images showing different angles of the product, usage, lifestyle etc. Add to this usually half a dozen gallery images and then multiple images associated to size and color selections. My question is about alt tags and keyword stuffing. Imagine the product is a swiss army knife.(not really but good example). You have multiple pictures showing different uses for the tools included, different gallery shots and different colors and other options. You may have 30-40 images in total. To keep the alt tags useful of readers requires saying Swiss army knife every time. However this becomes keyword stuffing according to Yoast. I'm just not sure how to correctly handle this.

I'd appreciate any guidance or advice.
Thanks in advance

Kerry

[not2easy]

Hi Kerrya and Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Yoast's evaluations are not targeted to your e-comm type of content. Yoast is helpful to use for some of the other aspects of your content management but I would suggest ignoring how they see and evaluate the content and compare it to completely different goals. It is like comparing apples and oranges.

Yoast offers easy ways to manage your sitemaps so they list only your canonical URLs and don't list every conceivable version of your pages. I believe that woocommerce also offers you methods to deal with the ecommerce environment. Use each as it is intended and they help each other.

[Kerrya]

Thank you. That points me in the right direction. I guess I thought that buying Yoast's Woocommerce addon would address some of those points but I get what you're saying.

If I can ask, What are your thoughts about multiple images and alt tags. I don't want to get penalized for keyword stuffing. Which brings me to your other point.

I've read posts about products having noindex and canonicals url's pointing to a category page. You're saying this is a recommended practice?

Thanks again

Kerry

[not2easy]

There have been several discussions around here recently concerning the faceted navigation of e-commerce websites. I do not run any ecommerce installations so I'm not any kind of authority on that. I don't know that canonicals to a category page is ideal but it beats trying to index the minor variations between products.

My suggestion would be to use our site search (in the upper right) and find faceted navigation discussions. There is one this week: [webmasterworld.com...] about what happens when trying to manage the various URLs with robots.txt (not the best way)

The keyword stuffing question in image alt tags is again a situation that is different for commercial sites than for blogs. For myself I would look at the image alt tags on successful competitors and see how important they are in the real world vs. theory. I suspect that most have the same concerns and went one way or another to avoid it or decided that it was not worth the extra effort - but I do not know, sorry.

[Kerrya]

Thank you again. I’ll follow those leads :)