Bigcommerce SEO
Bigcommerce made some SEO “improvements” back in June. Problem is they actually had some very negative SEO impacts. Thanks to “Dylan” who saw one of my posts on Twitter. He forwarded me their newsletter from June where they discuss their improvements and also have a free SEO eBook. For an ecommerce platform, their SEO ebook lacks some key advice such as using structured data for all your products as well as a bunch of other basic stuff. Maybe I’m being too harsh but the ebook is very basic and sadly some of the things that are omitted, like using structured data for addresses (Google my business) is not possible on their CMS.
This video though is a last ditch attempt to get BigCommerce SEO to use robots.txt on mybigcommerce.com . This is a change they made in June. Basically they are duplicating all their clients sites at subdomains. If you use bigcommerce, do a search like this. site:mybigcommerce.com “brand name” you will then see your site in the results. As I point out in the video, they do use rel=”canonical” but they are using it from one domain to another. Now whilst Google will tell you that you can canonicalize across domains if you really have to, it doesn’t work. That is our experience anyway.
SEO & Canonical across domains
Over the years after working on thousands of sites we have found it a good idea not to use rel=”canonical” across domains, even though Google has a whole page telling you how to do it. The reason we don’t is that Google still crawls and indexes content even though it as the canonical tag AND Google webmaster tools sees it as a backlink. Wait, what? Yep, if you canonical from one domain to another Google will see that as a backlink from another domain.
Bigcommerce Inconsistent Canonicals
So digging a bit further since I made the video I can see that there is some real inconsistency in the way Bigcommerce applies the canonical tags to their sites. For instance the site below has it’s content indexed at both the sub domain and their real domain. In this case the sub domain is canonicaled to itself.
Why Bigcommerce?
Whilst it’s lovely to have an intellectual discussion on whether canonicals should work like this, here’s what we know;
- The sub domains are getting crawled and their pages indexed even though they are canonicalled
- Google sees these canonical URLs as backlinks from the subdomain to the main domain (spammy much?)
- Bigcommerce application of this technique seems inconsistent.
If you need these sub domains just BLOCK THEM FROM GOOGLE so we can all get on with our lives!!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
