SEO

Meta tags and indexing

• On pages with selected filters or a search query, the snippet adds <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">. Pagination pages without filters stay indexed. Turn this off with &noindexFiltered=`0`. With friendly URLs some of these pages stay indexable, see "Indexing friendly URL pages" below.
• AJAX responses are sent with the X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow header.
• Pagination links and the remove icons on selected filters are real links with href. A search bot can follow them without JavaScript.
• For <title>, H1, description and <link rel="canonical">, use the placeholders mscatalyst.title, mscatalyst.h1, mscatalyst.description and mscatalyst.canonical, see Page placeholders.

Title, H1 and description templates

The templates are set in system settings and apply when at least one filter is selected:

Setting	Default
mscatalyst_seo_title_filtered	—
mscatalyst_seo_h1_filtered	:
mscatalyst_seo_description	. . Найдено:

Placeholders: , (selected values and the search query), , .

Modes

The mode is set by the &seo property, or by the mscatalyst_seo_mode setting if the property is not set.

Mode	What it does
off	No friendly filter URLs, the URL has GET parameters.
native	Built-in friendly filter URLs. The plugin parses them on OnPageNotFound.
seofilter	A bridge to SeoFilter on MODX 2.
both	SeoFilter and built-in URLs together.

Built-in friendly URLs

With &seo=native`` every selected filter becomes a URL segment:

/catalog/vendor-nike/color-krasnyy-or-siniy/price-1000-2000/

A segment starts with the facet key. Values come from the labels and are transliterated to Latin. Several values are joined with -or-. Here krasnyy-or-siniy is the transliteration of "красный" (red) and "синий" (blue). For a range, the "from" and "to" bounds follow the key.

How to turn it on

1. Turn on MODX friendly URLs (friendly_urls).
2. Set the mscatalyst_seo_mode system setting to native or both. The plugin reads only the setting. The &seo property in a call does not turn it on.
3. The catalog section URL must end with /. With the .html suffix, or on sites without friendly URLs, filters stay in GET parameters.
4. The msCatalyst plugin must be attached to OnPageNotFound and OnWebPagePrerender. The 1.3.0 installer attaches both.

How the URL behaves

• Filters go into the path. Sorting, page number, page size and search stay in the query string: /catalog/vendor-nike/?page=2&sort=ms-price-asc.
• AJAX updates, pagination, the remove icons on selected values, "Clear all", Back and Forward all use these URLs.
• Old links with GET filters (/catalog/?vendor=31) and values in another order get a 301 to the one URL. Values inside a segment and the segments themselves follow a fixed order, so each selection has one URL.
• If any segment does not resolve (unknown key or value, a repeated key, an empty range), the visitor gets the 404 page. The catalog never opens under a stray URL.
• A catalog on the start page works too: /vendor-nike/.
• With Localizator the language prefix stays at the start: /en/vendor-nike/color-white/. Each language builds segments from its own labels. A Russian segment on the English version gets a 301 to the English one.

Indexing friendly URL pages

A friendly URL page stays indexable when it has no more than mscatalyst_seo_index_max selected values (2 by default). Ranges, search, non-default sorting, a non-default page size and more values get noindex, follow. With 0, every filtered page is noindex. While friendly URLs are off, the old &noindexFiltered rule applies.

mscatalyst.canonical holds the full URL with scheme and host, without sorting and page number. The language prefix is already included. Put it into the template <head> as is:

<link rel="canonical" href="[[!+mscatalyst.canonical]]">

The msCatalystSitemap snippet outputs a sitemap of filter URLs and landing pages:

[[!msCatalystSitemap? &catalogs=`*`]]

Landing pages

A page with its own URL, title, H1 and text for a filter combination, for example /catalog/white-sneakers/. Works in native mode on MODX 2 and MODX 3, no SeoFilter needed. See Landing pages.

SeoFilter

If SeoFilter is already set up on the site, msCatalyst imports its rules, URLs and dictionary, and templates with [[+sf.*]] keep working. While SeoFilter stays on a MODX 2 site, the seofilter and both modes act as a bridge to it. See Moving from SeoFilter.