Is WooCommerce good for SEO?

It can be, and it is not automatically. WooCommerce gives you full control of URLs, markup and content, which is an advantage over closed platforms. The risks are plugin bloat slowing the site and faceted navigation generating thousands of crawlable URLs.

What is a canonical tag for?

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when the same content is reachable at several addresses. It consolidates ranking signals onto the URL you nominate, rather than letting the engine choose for you.

What should I do with out of stock products?

It depends on whether the product is coming back. Temporarily out of stock: keep the page indexed with availability set to OutOfStock. Discontinued with a replacement: 301 to it. Discontinued with nothing similar: keep the page or return 410. Seasonal: never delete.

E-commerce

How do I stop Google indexing my filter pages?

Canonicalise filtered views to the clean category URL and stop linking to combinations you do not want crawled. Use robots.txt disallow deliberately and second — it blocks the crawl that would read a noindex, stranding URLs already in the index.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 168 words 3 sections

The scale of the problem

Filters multiply rather than add. Four filters with five values each produce over six hundred combinations before pagination and sort order, and almost none of them are queries anyone typed.

The order that works

Canonicalise every filtered view to the clean category URL
Remove internal links to filter combinations you do not want crawled
Noindex the ones already indexed, and let them be crawled so the noindex is read
Only once they have dropped out, consider a robots.txt disallow to save crawl attention

The exception worth promoting

A handful of facet combinations have real search demand and no dedicated competitor page. Promote those few to proper landing pages with their own copy — it is one of the highest-return moves in e-commerce SEO.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, The e-commerce SEO checklist, in the order the checks actually matter covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.