We recommend this article for SEO specialists to read before starting a SEO audit of a website created with Cartum, as well as for website owners to understand all the features of their site.

The article describes Cartum's technical solutions for improving SEO capabilities and built-in tools that can be used to promote a website.

Cartum allows you to flexibly customize the hyperlink generation formula for different types of pages.

Examples of possible link formats for category pages:

Examples of possible link formats for product pages:

Different formulas can be customized for these types of pages:

Customizing the link format allows you to avoid redirects and preserve old page addresses when migrating to Cartum from other platforms. You can change the link format on a live site as well — we remember the old address for all pages and all old links remain working.

Every time you change the address of a page on a live site, we remember its old address and automatically redirect all users from the old address to the new one.

Filter pages are created using the following template:

/category/filter/paramName1=14;paramName2=1,2/

The template cannot be changed. It is possible to manually set links for specific combinations of filters using the Filter presets option.

We carefully control the indexing of all types of website pages, and we allow indexing only those pages that should be included in the search index and prohibit indexing of all additional pages (duplicates) that do not contain unique content.

We use a combination of several tools to manage website indexing and combat duplicate content:

For more information on how we control the indexing of each type of page, see Managing website indexing.

By default, all categories in the product catalog are available for indexing. If necessary, you can disable indexing for certain categories by enabling the "noindex" and "nofollow" options in the category properties. Products for which this category is the parent will also be closed for indexing (the value of the <meta robots> tag will be duplicated for them).

For nested subcategories, the values of these options are not duplicated, i.e. the subcategories are not closed for indexing along with the parent category.

By default, all language versions of the site are available for indexing. If necessary, you can close the indexing of a particular language version of the site.

This option is enabled by the support team upon request. In this case, all pages of this language version are closed from indexing. The language version that is closed for indexing can remain open to users.

By default, all filter pages are closed for indexing. But there are two ways to open the necessary filters for indexing.

Since there is no consensus on whether paginated pages should be indexed and how to block them from indexing, we have implemented three methods:

You can enable the second or third indexing mode in the admin panel of your site in Marketing → SEO → Additional SEO settings.

We recommend that you change the pagination indexing mode only if you understand the consequences of doing so.

The mobile version does not create duplicate links, as it uses the same page addresses as the desktop version. We use dynamic display technology: we determine the type of device and automatically display different html code. To make search engines understand that there are different versions of the site for different types of devices, we use the http header vary, according to Google's recommendations.

In the footer of the desktop version, there is a link to manually switch to the mobile version (/?v=mobile). This link is closed from indexing.

The contents of the file work in conjunction with all the other steps described above, it is standard for all projects and does not need to be changed. Moreover, any changes made to this file can lead to indexing disruption and increase the server load.

If your SEO specialists recommend changes to robots.txt, we will analyze these changes and, if they are really useful, implement them in future updates for all projects. But experience shows that most of these suggestions don't make sense.

For the <title>, <h1>, <meta name="keywords"> and <meta name="description"> tags of each page, there is a possibility of flexible content management, namely:

In addition, for all categories of the product catalog, you can specify SEO text that is placed in the site code above the main content of the page.

We have also taken into account all standard semantics recommendations. We use header tags, image captions, etc. correctly.

We have already implemented all the microdata tags that are suitable for different types of online store pages. Google sometimes changes its attitude to tags: it adds new properties, starts requiring mandatory filling of previously optional fields, or even prohibits the use of some tags in specific cases.

We try to keep track of such changes. But if you notice any useful tags missing or an error in filling in the existing ones, please let us know.

The sitemap.xml file is generated automatically and contains:

When the number of pages in a file exceeds 50k, the file is automatically split into several.

The priorities specified for pages follow the standard page hierarchy:

The file is updated automatically once every hour or manually by clicking on the Generate sitemap.xml button in Marketing → SEO → sitemap.xml.

We do not make custom changes to sitemap generation algorithms for individual projects.

We have already performed all the necessary optimization to achieve maximum Google PageSpeed Insight scores. However, the actual score of each site depends on various external factors that we have no influence on. Therefore, the Google PageSpeed Insight tool will continue to provide recommendations for website improvement. You should not treat these recommendations as mandatory. But you should make sure that everything possible is done.

We have taken a number of steps to improve image indexing. Namely:

We have provided for the possibility of easy integration of Google Analytics and any other marketing systems that require js-code to be executed upon the occurrence of certain events.