The URLs and the sitemap

Enable simplified URLs

A simplified URL is a URL that is readable by a visitor (and in fact easier to type in an address bar). Furthermore, it also contains key expressions that are useful for PrestaShop SEO. But for this you need to activate them (they should be by default). If your site does not support them, it is a server-level configuration that needs to be amended. To enable simplified URLs, click on Store Settings in the menu, then on Traffic and finally on SEO & URLs

Optimize the simplified URL of the product page

You can stick with the default approach of PrestaShop. Otherwise, remove empty words like "de", "par", "pour", etc. from the simplified URL.

Chase the fake urls so the errors 404

A 404 c' is an error page, which does not exist or no longer exists. You should avoid having it on the site, as it is a signal of poor quality. To chase them away, there are two solutions: prevent them and track them. To prevent them, you need to find a solution before creating them! A product that leaves the store is a potential page 404, as is a category. Fortunately, PrestaShop has everything planned and allows you to choose the behavior of a product that you disable. I had already proposed a solution by archiving, but failing that, a 301 redirect is a neat solution. PrestaShop also proposes a 302 redirect, which is temporary: to be used if you think you will put the product back online in the coming weeks. If you are not sure, a 301 that you will then cancel is acceptable. The only two mistakes not to make are to put a 404 or even to delete the product (which is worse than anything: no possible return and immediate 404...)

Of the 404, since no one is perfect, you will certainly have some. Google Webmaster Tools can help you with that. The other option is to browse the site as a search engine would with ad hoc software. Screaming Frog (free and paid) or Xenu (free) are two possibilities. It's not perfect (they can get lost in the intricacies of the site's URLs, hence a somewhat complex setup) but you can find some of them and possibly see why they were created.

Configure the canonical URLs

A canonical URL is the one that is referenced in the case (frequent!) where multiple URLs lead to the same page. The search engine is told (this is completely transparent for a visitor) which URL should be indexed for the current page. This avoids duplicate content. PrestaShop supports this natively.

You have three possible settings:

• No redirection, it is the worst option.
• 302, to be used when creating the store,
• 301, to use once your site is launched. If you need to add products later, still stay on setting 301.

Disallow accented URLs

Accented URLs are not necessarily a hindrance to natural referencing, but they are still marginal and can ultimately disturb your visitors. Forget them!

What is a Sitemap?

The Sitemap is an XML (or txt) file that will contain all the URLs you want to be indexed by search engines.

A Sitemap file is limited to 50,000 URLs and a maximum size of 10MB.

If your store has a very large number of pages and your Sitemap file exceeds the authorized quotas, it is then necessary to generate several Sitemaps as well as a "sitemap index" that will be responsible for listing the different "sub-sitemaps" that you have created.

In addition to listing the pages, images and videos of your site, a Sitemap file can contain additional information about each URL such as the update frequency, the duration of a video, etc.

What is the Sitemap used for?

The Sitemap is not supposed to improve the SEO of your site. Its role is to help search engines better index the contents of your store.

Indexing a page means making sure that search engines are aware of its existence and that they add it to their "index"!

If a page is not indexed, it can never be properly positioned in search results.

Do I need a Sitemap?

The real question to ask is "Does Google know all my pages, images and videos?"

If that is not the case, then you will need to try to understand why.

If you do not know why your site's indexing is not complete or if you cannot correct the problem, in this case you need a Sitemap.

How do I know if Google has properly indexed my pages?

You just need to go to Google, type "site:votresite.com" and look at the number of results obtained.

You can also log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account and then go to the "Google Index / Indexing Status" menu. You will then see the "Total number of indexed pages".

Caution, remember to check the date of the last indexing because there may be several days of delay. To find out, simply hover over the last point of the curve shown on the graph you see on this page.

Now that you know the number of pages that have been indexed by Google, you just need to compare it with the total number of pages on your site.

Why doesn't Google index all pages of the site?

Here are some classic reasons why Google (and other search engines) may not be aware of all your pages (images or videos).

1. Your site is recent or / and has very few incoming links.
2. Your site is very large.
3. Some pages are not accessible via conventional links.
4. Some pages are blocked by an htacess or robots.txt file.
5. Some pages have a "noindex" meta tag.
6. The links to your pages are in "nofollow".
7. You have too many pages with error 404
8. You have duplicate content pages.
9. Your site is too slow.

How to create a Sitemap on PrestaShop?

By default, the sitemap is automatically created by PrestaShop and integrated into the footer.