In the optimization of e-commerce website, many webmasters pay attention to the product detail page, but ignore the efficiency of search engine crawling. For WordPress E-commerce site, the reasonable use of Robots.txt can reduce unnecessary crawl waste, the search engine's attention to focus on the product and category pages. This article combines practical examples to show the optimization of e-commerce sites in the Robots configuration ideas.

What is crawl waste?

Crawl waste refers to the search engine spends too much time on worthless or repetitive pages, and the really valuable product pages and feature pages are not included in a timely manner. Common sources of crawl waste are:

• Shopping cart, checkout and other dynamic pages
• Duplicate filter results page
• Link to the parameters generated by the plugin
• Tab or archive page with no content

The inclusion of these pages has no ranking value and dilutes the overall site crawl frequency.

E-commerce Website Frequently Asked Questions

WordPress e-commerce sites often rely on WooCommerce plugin, which brings in a number of additional URLs. e.g.:

• /cart/ shopping cart page
• /checkout/ checkout page
• /my-account/ user center
• /product-tag/ Product tabs

If these directories are crawled by search engines, it will be a waste of resources and may also lead to duplicate entries.

Case sharing: the optimization process of a clothing e-commerce site

Initial situation

The site had been slow to be indexed, with many new products taking weeks to appear in search results. Inspection revealed that the search engine was wasting crawl frequency on a large number of useless shopping cart and checkout pages.

Adjustment program

exist Robots.txt Add the following rule to it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Disallow: /product-tag/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml

In this way, pages related to the shopping process are blocked and the search engine crawling focus returns to the product and category pages.

Optimization effect

After three weeks, new products on the site are indexed within two days on average. The overall number of indexes on the site was reduced, but the inclusion rate and exposure of key pages increased, and search traffic was more stable.

Why are Robots important for e-commerce?

• Save Crawl Frequency: Search engines don't waste resources on duplicate pages.
• Highlighted pages: Product details and category pages get more attention.
• Reducing the risk of invalid inclusion: Shopping cart, account page blocked for cleaner search results.
• become man and wife Sitemap: Getting the real core pages into the search engine indexes faster.

Recommended Robots Configuration for E-Commerce Sites

A clean, practical example of e-commerce Robots:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Disallow: /product-tag/
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Configuration points

• Block background and system folders.
• Block dynamic pages such as shopping cart, checkout, and user center.
• Block useless tabs.
• Add Sitemap path to improve inclusion efficiency.

How do I check if Robots are in effect?

• Type in your browser https://你的域名/robots.txt, to see if the content is correct.
• utilization Google Search Console The "Check URL" function of the "Check URL" function confirms that the blocked directory will not be crawled.
• Regularly observe the number of sites indexed to prevent blocking important pages by mistake.

summarize

E-commerce site content is huge, reasonable Robots configuration can help search engines to focus their efforts on the truly valuable pages. As you can see from the case study, after avoiding wasteful crawling, the site's inclusion speed is significantly improved, and the product page has more chances to rank. If you are using WordPress Building an e-commerce site, you can check your Robots.txt for invalid crawls and leave resources for core content to get better search performance.

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