Magento webshop SEO, please help me out

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Note: I have also posted this thread in "Building eCommerce Sites", but I think it fits better here. If it's not, please close it and I will continue there.

Hi all,

Recently I have launched a new Magento store. Of course my goal is to dominate in SEO or at least optimize the store so that my efforts reach their maximum potential.

I have four topics outlined below and did thorough research on all of them. As I am not a SEO expert, I would like to know your opinions on the topics, also I am afraid I could overdo SEO as a result of my limited knowledge and get penalized. Thanks in advance for responding to the topics below!

1. No follow catalog search results

At the moment plenty of urls who are indexed from my new store are search results. For example: search results for 'red'. As these urls have no meaning for me shutting them down would stop them from eating link juice right?

I have found a thread on the magento forums where is said that the code below (added to the local.xml) will prevent bots from indexing the catalog search results:

Code:
<catalogsearch_result_index translate="label">
        <reference name="head">
            <action method="setRobots"><value>NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW</value></action>
        </reference>
    </catalogsearch_result_index>
    <catalogsearch_advanced_index translate="label">
        <reference name="head">
            <action method="setRobots"><value>NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW</value></action>
        </reference>
    </catalogsearch_advanced_index>
    <catalogsearch_advanced_result translate="label">
        <reference name="head">
            <action method="setRobots"><value>NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW</value></action>
        </reference>
    </catalogsearch_advanced_result>
This is a valid solution?

2. Images are weirdly indexed

I have came across this problem a few days ago and don't really have a clue what to do.

On other magento stores that I have images are indexed from the product page. When someone clicks the image at "Google image search" they will be transferred to the product page where the image is located.

For some reason on my new website the images are indexed directly from the source. When someone clicks the image they are not directed to the product page but to the image itself.

As I put a lot of effort in optimizing the alt tags this is losing me customers who could convert.

I am guessing that for some reason Google bot is indexing the images trough the folders of my store as I have no rules in my robotx.txt that disallow him to look in for example: /media/

I have found the robots.txt shown below on Groovecommerce.com. Will this ensure that my images are indexed in the correct way? Also there is a lot more specified in the robots.txt then only Disallow: /media/. Will the other rules harm my store or are they also good to use?

Code:
Groove Commerce Magento Robots.txt 05/2011
#
# robots.txt
#
# This file is to prevent the crawling and indexing of certain parts
# of your site by web crawlers and spiders run by sites like Yahoo!
# and Google. By telling these "robots" where not to go on your site,
# you save bandwidth and server resources.
#
# This file will be ignored unless it is at the root of your host:
# Used:    http://example.com/robots.txt
# Ignored: http://example.com/site/robots.txt
#
# For more information about the robots.txt standard, see:
# http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
#
# For syntax checking, see:
# http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html

# Website Sitemap
Sitemap: http://[your_website]/sitemap.xml

# Crawlers Setup

# Directories
User-agent: *
Disallow: /404/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /magento/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /blog/

# Paths (clean URLs)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /control/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customize/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /poll/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wishlist/

# Files
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /STATUS.txt

# Paths (no clean URLs)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*?p=*&amp;
Disallow: /*?SID=
3. No follow layered navigation filter

To make navigation for my customers as painless as possible. I have a lot of filters on the product listing pages. These filters often end with for example: /?price=10-20.

To get around this problem I use canonical urls so that every filtered page reverts back to the "original" page. For as far as I know there are also no urls with parameters indexed in Google.

Would it provide a additional benefit to no follow the layered navigation filter? I get a bit scared in the Google webmastertools that the filter is creating literally more than then thousands of urls.

4. Using no follow and robots.txt disallow

If I for example use the robots.txt rom above to Disallow: /catalogsearch/ and use rel=nofollow for all catalog search results, will this impact my SEO negatively? Or can it be perfectly fine to use two rules to achieve the same?

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Thanks everyone for responding
#magento #seo #webshop

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