Commerce Cloud (now owned by Salesforce, formerly DemandWare) is an enterprise eCommerce management solution. There's a number of unique SEO challenges associated with Commerce Cloud, all of which our agency is familiar with from servicing dozens of clients who run on the platform.

This article will cover the most common Commerce Cloud SEO challenges we've come across and how to address them.

TL;DR

  • Commerce Cloud has funky out-of-box configurations, mainly issues with URLs
  • Failure to understand and manage these issues can be severe at the enterprise level — mainly leading to a wasted crawl budget and decreased indexation rate
  • Make sure you're consistently crawling your website to check directives, indexation, and status codes — we recommend re-crawling quarterly

1. Category Page Duplications

Category pages are incredibly important in eCommerce SEO because they satisfy a different search intent than a product page. For example, say you're searching Google to "buy protein powder." Even though you're looking to buy, the intent behind that search is NOT to view a specific protein powder (i.e., a product page), but instead to browse various proteins (i.e., a category page).

Your keyword research should identify that each product category has enough search demand to warrant its own page. Let's say you carry 100 SKUs of whey protein powders — it's a general best practice for user experience to "hide" more than 12 products on initial load.

Commerce Cloud gives you the option to "hide" some products in order to save on page load times, and then a visitor can "unhide" all products by clicking a "view all" button. Upon clicking "view all", DemandWare will append ?viewAll=true to the end of the category page URL. Since this is a crawl-able URL, this creates duplicate content issues on key category pages that need to be addressed.

Solution

  • On ?viewAll=true pages, add canonical tags pointing back to the root category page
  • Alternatively, block this URL parameter from being crawled outright via the robots.txt file

2. Issues with Faceted Navigation

"Faceted navigation" refers to how your store filters and sorts products using a secondary navigation — usually housed within a sidebar. Commerce Cloud's faceted navigation appends parameters to URLs each time a new search filter is added.

A single category page may have 40+ options to refine results, including sorting by brand, price, size, and serving. Each of these serves up a different URL parameter, creating thousands of new URL variations, all indexable by Google. This is a crawl budget nightmare at enterprise scale.

Solution

  • Block these URL parameter URLs from being crawled outright via robots.txt, or
  • Use Google Search Console's URL parameter settings — this lets you implement the changes without burning programmer hours. Add the parameters into the URL Parameters report in GSC manually and set them to not be crawled
  • Note: If these URLs have already been indexed by Google, use the "noindex" tag on all URLs that contain these parameters. Check GSC to verify pages have been removed from the index before proceeding with URL Parameters

3. Product Page Duplication

When a visitor clicks on a product in your grid, the platform will append URL parameters based on the position of the product in the grid. For example, if you click on the product in the first position, the URL will include position-based parameters. This creates Googlebot crawl traps — wasting your crawl budget on low quality URLs that are essentially duplicates of the root product page.

Solution

  • Use canonical URLs to point to the root product page — the canonical should always reference the clean, parameter-free product URL

4. Dealing with /demandware/ Directories

Whenever we crawl a new client's website we always discover directories that are not useful for crawlers and search engines. These directories can include staging domains, login pages, and product variations. These pages are carbon copies of the root page, creating issues with duplicate content and wasted crawl budgets.

Solution

  • Disallow and "noindex" /demandware.store/ and /demandware.static/ in your robots.txt file
  • This ensures crawlers don't burn budget on these non-SEO directories

5. Silos Within Internal Link Structures

Internal links help distribute equity across your pages. Since Commerce Cloud has so many issues with URLs, it's easy for the system to default to linking to the wrong version of a page. When your category pages link to appended product page URLs, while those URLs are canonicalized, you're losing some of that internal link equity being passed through.

Solution

  • Double check your page templates to ensure that all internal links are pointing to the absolute URLs
  • Once the template is updated, block the ?cgid= parameter in your robots.txt file
  • Adidas (also a Commerce Cloud client) is a good reference for how to structure clean internal links on this platform

6. Check Your 404 Page Setup

It's SEO best practice for your site to deliver a 404 error for a page that's not found. For some reason, almost every Commerce Cloud install we've seen defaults to a 302 redirect or a 301 redirect when a page is not found — redirecting the user to a duplicate version of the home page.

Solution

  • Set up a custom 404 page on your site
  • Your 404 page should notify users (and search engines) and distribute equity to key pages on the site — use it strategically, not as a dead end
  • 1 800 Contacts' 404 page is a great Commerce Cloud example to reference

7. Title Tag and Description Defaults

Title tags are not only a ranking factor, but they influence a searcher's click behavior. It's critical to create page titles that capture keywords but also drive user action. Commerce Cloud lets you set default page titles and meta descriptions — take advantage of this. If you have thousands of products, it will save you a ton of time. You'll still want to customize your titles, as sometimes the defaults can backfire if not periodically reviewed.

Recommendation

  • Set default titles — title tags should default to the product name
  • Set default descriptions — description tags should default to the product description
  • Split test page titles and metas to increase CTR in SERP
  • For Commerce Cloud clients, review page titles for accuracy quarterly

Additional SEO Limitations of Commerce Cloud

1. No Access to Server Log Files

We've discussed a lot of issues with Commerce Cloud URLs. This increases the importance of analyzing your site's crawl budget using server log files. You'll need to be extra diligent using other tools (mainly GSC) to monitor your crawl since direct server log access isn't available.

2. Capitalization in URLs

Using uppercase letters in a URL can confuse search engines by causing duplication issues. While this isn't a huge issue, we suggest getting out in front of it to manage it proactively.

3. Automate Image ALT Attributes

Editing image ALT tags on Commerce Cloud is a ridiculously tedious process. Work with your developers to see if they can automate image ALT tag creation — this is a worthwhile engineering investment at enterprise scale.

4. Homepage Configuration

Sometimes Commerce Cloud will generate long, ugly alternate homepage URLs. Identify these URLs and make sure you use 301 redirects pointing back to the root home page.

Next Steps

Commerce Cloud is a great solution for enterprise eCommerce management. However, it comes with a built-in set of technical SEO challenges that require proactive management.

We strongly suggest evaluating the technical elements of your website quarterly with a fresh crawl. If your website is too large for enterprise SEO crawlers, contact us — we've built a number of custom crawlers in Hadoop for clients at this scale.

The key takeaway: don't set it and forget it. Commerce Cloud requires ongoing SEO governance to maintain a healthy crawl budget and strong indexation rates. The platforms that win in organic search are the ones where someone is actively managing these configurations.