Search Engine Optimization

Maho includes a broad set of built-in SEO features: page metadata, canonical tags, clean URLs, automatic crawl controls for layered navigation, XML sitemaps, and multi-store hreflang. This guide walks through all of them and points you at the admin location for each.

Most settings live in three places under System > Configuration:

For file-level crawler directives (blocking whole paths, crawl delay, sitemap location), see the dedicated robots.txt page.

Page metadata

Global defaults

Under Design > HTML Head you set the store-wide fallbacks used when a page does not provide its own values:

• Default Title, Title Prefix, Title Suffix - the title shell wrapped around each page title.
• Default Description and Default Keywords - used when a page has none of its own.
• Default Robots - the store-wide robots directive (for example INDEX,FOLLOW) applied when no more specific rule exists.

The Page Title Separator (under Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations) is the character used to join the title parts, - by default.

Per-page metadata

Products, categories, and CMS pages each have their own meta title, meta description, meta keywords, and meta robots fields, set on the SEO section of their admin edit screens. The per-entity meta_robots field accepts directives such as INDEX,FOLLOW or NOINDEX,FOLLOW and lets you override indexing on a single product, category, or page.

How the robots directive is resolved

For any frontend page, Maho resolves the meta robots tag through a fallback chain, using the first value it finds:

1. The current product's meta robots (on a product page)
2. The current category's meta robots (on a category page)
3. The current CMS page's meta robots (on a CMS page)
4. The store's Default Robots setting

The layered-navigation controls below sit on top of this chain for category pages.

Canonical tags

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the "official" version of a page, consolidating ranking signals onto it.

Layered navigation crawl controls v26.7+

Category pages with layered navigation are a classic SEO trap. A single category can generate a near-infinite number of URLs as visitors combine filters (color, size, price, brand) and walk through pagination, wasting crawl budget and creating duplicate content that competes against your real category page. Maho manages this automatically with three options, all enabled by default.

Add NOINDEX,FOLLOW to Filtered Layered Navigation Pages

When a visitor applies one or more layered-navigation filters, the resulting page is marked NOINDEX,FOLLOW. Search engines are told not to index the filtered view (avoiding duplicate content), but they still follow the links on it, so your products keep getting discovered.

Add NOINDEX,FOLLOW to Paginated Category Pages

Pages beyond the first (?p=2 and onward) are marked NOINDEX,FOLLOW. The first page of a category stays indexable as the canonical entry point, while thin "page 2, 3, 4..." views are kept out of the index without blocking crawlers from walking through them.

Add rel="nofollow" to Layered Navigation Filter Links

Filter links in the layered-navigation block carry rel="nofollow", signaling to crawlers that filter-combination URLs are not worth prioritizing. This reduces wasted crawl budget at the source, before a crawler even requests the filtered URL.

How Maho decides

The robots directive for a category view follows a clear order of precedence:

1. An explicit category noindex always wins. If you set the category's meta robots field to a value containing noindex, that directive is respected everywhere and the canonical tag is suppressed for that page. The admin's intent is never weakened.
2. Filtered and paginated views are noindexed as duplicates, even when the category itself is explicitly indexable, as long as the matching option above is enabled.
3. Otherwise the page is indexable and renders the category's own robots value plus its canonical tag.

Filter detection reads directly from the request, so it does not depend on render order, and pagination detection uses the catalog toolbar's configured page parameter, so it keeps working even if you customize the toolbar.

URL structure

Clean, stable URLs are a core part of SEO. The Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations group controls how catalog URLs are built:

• Product URL Suffix / Category URL Suffix - an optional suffix such as .html appended to product and category URLs. Leave blank for extensionless URLs.
• Use Categories Path for Product URLs - when enabled, product URLs include the category path (/men/jackets/product-name) instead of a bare product slug.
• Create Permanent Redirect for URLs if URL Key Changed (save_rewrites_history) - when a product or category URL key changes, Maho automatically creates a permanent 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, preserving link equity and avoiding broken links.

URL rewrites are stored in the core_url_rewrite table, and you can add custom rewrites and redirects there as well.

Multi-store hreflang

When a website has more than one active store view, Maho automatically emits <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> tags pointing to the equivalent URL in each other store view, based on each store's locale. This tells search engines which language/region version to serve and prevents the variants from being treated as duplicate content. No configuration is required: the tags appear automatically once a second active store view exists and the matching URL rewrite is present.

XML sitemap

The Google Sitemap module (Catalog > Google Sitemap) generates standards-compliant XML sitemaps covering your categories, products, and CMS pages. Key capabilities:

• Per-entity settings: change frequency, priority, and a lastmod timestamp configurable separately for categories, products, and CMS pages.
• Image extension: product and category images can be included as <image:image> entries to help image search.
• Automatic file splitting: when a sitemap exceeds the configured maximum URLs per file (50,000 by default), Maho splits it into multiple files and generates a sitemap index.
• Scheduled generation: a cron job regenerates the sitemap on a configurable frequency and can email a recipient if generation fails.

Once generated, reference the sitemap file from your robots.txt so crawlers can find it.

HTML sitemap and search terms

Two additional options in the Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations group:

• Autogenerated Site Map - a human-friendly HTML sitemap listing categories and products, served under /catalog/seo_sitemap/category and /catalog/seo_sitemap/product.
• Popular Search Terms - exposes popular on-site search terms as crawlable links.

Pages Maho keeps out of the index

Some pages should never be indexed, and Maho marks them noindex, nofollow out of the box:

• The entire admin panel, including the login, forgot-password, and reset-password screens.
• The maintenance mode page shown while the store is offline.

You typically reinforce this in robots.txt by disallowing checkout, customer account, cart, and search paths.

Recommended setup

For most stores the defaults are the right starting point:

• Category canonical tag: enabled
• NOINDEX filtered pages: enabled
• NOINDEX paginated pages: enabled
• NOFOLLOW filter links: enabled
• A populated Default Robots, Default Title, and Default Description under HTML Head
• XML sitemap generation enabled and referenced from robots.txt

The catalog SEO settings are configurable per store view, so multi-store and multi-language setups can tune crawl behavior independently. Pair them with a tailored robots.txt for complete control over how search engines crawl and index your catalog.