Ah, yet another million dollar question. If you have organized your WooCommerce products properly, you have “N” product categories and “M” product tags, where “M > N” (actually, if there were such a thing in algebra, it should be “M >>> N” as each product should be assigned to 1 category and multiple tags).
This means a lot of duplicate content. Even worse, if you have a product category called “Hats” and a product tag called “Hat”, what would you do if you were Google? Correct – it would probably not index either one as this is confusing in regard to user experience.
WooCommerce Product Tags vs WooCommerce Product Categories
Same as for WordPress posts, WooCommerce Product Tags are meant to describe specific details of your products. This is to facilitate user navigation or show product details you wouldn’t otherwise be able to show.
Product categories are… categories. Think of a shop such as IKEA: similar products are on similar shelves – they’re grouped by “category”.
Therefore, you should definitely categorize your WooCommerce products – unless you run a small ecommerce website with a handful of products (and therefore just 1 or 2 categories).
On the other hand, you can definitely avoid using product tags – unless this enhances user experience!
Remember, WooCommerce Product Tag pages might rank on Google but are usually of low quality with not much content (apart from the product listing).
Is this helpful to a user? Is this helpful to Google? These are the two questions you should consider based on your ecommerce website.
How to Noindex WooCommerce Product Tags
The YOAST SEO plugin gives you this advanced feature out of the box. On average, and based on what we said above, WooCommerce Product Tag pages don’t really add value to search engines, and therefore they should be removed from the index and your sitemap.
Remove from Sitemap
Go to your WordPress Dashboard > SEO > XML Sitemaps and remove WooCommerce Product Tag pages from the sitemap. Then click on “Save”.
Remove from Index
Go to WordPress Dashboard > SEO > Titles & Meta > Taxonomies and set WooCommerce Product Tag pages to “noindex”. Then click on “Save”.
hi
i have problem that is , i imported many mistake tags on woo ( over 3500 )
now i confused and want to delete them , but they are indexed by google , when i remove them must redirect them….
You can use the Redirection plugin (or custom code) to automatically redirect all /product-tag/ pages to where you want. You can delete the tags safely after that
Hello Rodolfo, I have optimized my product_tag pages in WooCommerce. Would indexing them AND setting a canonical URL from the tag, to the category page, help or hurt my SEO. Or could that be basically the same as no-indexing the tags?
Not really, canonical is to tell Google there are 2 pages with duplicate content and which one it should choose for indexing. Are your tag and category pages identical?
Thank you Rodolfo, this is a really good advice. I use The SEO Framework Plugin instead Yoast, it’s a good idea to migrate? both have mostly same tools, what you think about it?
I have no personal opinion, if the one you use works, stay with that
Thank you Rodolfo Melogli for the article, i have a question.
Should I index second page, third, etc shop page category? Or just the first page category?
I just want to know your opinion
I believe that’s a good idea indeed
Hi there! Nice article and very complete… Still, I have one doubt… Should we index product categories or not? Best Regards
Read prev comments please
On my website there are many options to index or no-index because of a variety of product categories. I can index or no index next values: colour, weight, hand orientation, manufacturer etc.
Should we index product brand, colour, size, weight etc? Thank you for your answer.
An SEO professional would help here
Thanks for your article. I did that through new Yoast SEO interface I checked that there is noindex for robots in the page.. The pages were crawled again yesterday but the pages still exist when I search in Google.. why?
It’ll take a while until Google removes them
Thank you for the great article. So you are suggesting to noindex tags. Should I also noindex product categories?
Categories are fine, if it makes sense to index them
Hello Rodolfo,
Thank you for the amazing Woo articles. They have been a huge help for me and my Woocommerce website.
I have a question regarding product attributes. Should we index them or no?
Following the logic of the article, they should not be indexed, but I just wanted to hear your opinion about it.
Thank in advance!
Thank you! Exactly, I wouldn’t recommend that
Hi Rodolfo,
I have a question you might be able to answer for me.
Can I rank a Woocommerce category page?
Actually, I am setting up an affiliate website using woocommerce to create woocommerce products under woocommerce categories.
What is the best way to go for good rankings?
On the search console I have pages that are excluded do to noindexing them but I dont know how they are generated.
for examle /?cat=1231421
When I access them it opens my website search results page with auto-filled different values. As a result there are about 300 excluded pages
No idea without looking at your code and settings I’m afraid, sorry Nikos. If you’d like to get a quote, feel free to contact me here. Thanks a lot for your understanding!
Hi Rodolfo, I’m following your recommendations from the article but my current version of Yoast SEO (Free 11.8) is lacking some settings like “Titles & Metas”, XML Sitemaps, Advanced, …
Maybe Yoast is moving more settings from the Free version to the Pro version.
Now I don’t know how to implement your recommendations in this version. Looking forward to your feedback.
I’d be surprised if that was the case. In the General tab, try to toggle some switches to see if you can enable those settings maybe?
Thank for this useful article. I wanna know if shop page must be indexed or not!
Yes it should be indexed 🙂
What about the Product shipping classes settings? Should we enable them for indexing or not?
Definitely noindex! Thank you Karan 🙂
Hey Rodolfo,
Thanks for this great article.
I was searching for correct settings for Yoast Woocommerce SEO plugin and finally, I found it here.
Thank you!
Thank for this useful article. But I wanna ask you; which is the best? YOAST Seo or Al in One Seo
Hey Dahi, whatever is best for you 🙂
Any thoughts about that tags pages ranking well than product pages ?
Hey Fevzi, thanks for your comment 🙂 It really depends on your business model. Given for granted single products should always be indexed, maybe in your case you could no-index product categories and keep the tags. But once again, SEO is not always 100% right 🙂
Hello Rodolfo Melogli, Thanks for article. i have read about post tag or category tag on yoast setting is bad for seo because content duplicat. now i bit confusing about Custom Post Type Archives for Products. it must index or not ?,
i see your picture on article “https://businessbloomer.com/resolved-woocommerce-change-shop-page-seo-meta-title-products-archive/” you choose no index for custom post type archieves for product and object.
Hey Aceng, yes, you should index the Shop page, definitely 🙂
Thanks for the article. But Yoast SEO says the opposite here: https://yoast.com/ask-yoast-include-taxonomies-in-xml-sitemap/
Lyse
Thanks for that Lyse 🙂 They also say this:
So, the compromise to all this is: unless you fill out product tag description, title, image and other SEO elements for all product tags (same should be done for all product categories), product tag pages should be unindexed. On the other hand, if SEO work is done on each specific product tag page, then YOAST suggestion comes useful 🙂