Attribute URLs in WooCommerce and how they affect SEO.

This can lead to index bloat and can reduce the number of pages getting indexed that you want to be indexed.

When you create a new product attribute, for example, Sizes, you’ll probably add many options – Extra small, Small, Medium, Large, X-large, XXL and so on.

When you create an attribute, there is an option to enable the archive.

If you check this box, an archive page is created for each attribute term, and these are then linked from every product page in the Additional Information tab.

Even if you tell Yoast or Rank Math not to create an XML sitemap, these pages will still get indexed due to internal links.

This means that if you have 100s of attributes with lots of terms, this can potentially be 1000s of pages on your site that Google will try and index.

You don’t want these pages crawled as it uses up your crawl budget and could mean that some pages you want to be indexed don’t make it in there.

When Google visits your site to index it, it only has a finite amount of time; this is your crawl budget.

This is why you don’t want Google wasting budget indexing low-quality pages (which is an attribute archive).

If Google is indexing too much poor-quality content on your site, it will affect your entire site’s ability to rank.

In most cases, don’t create archive pages for product attributes in WooCommerce.

If you must, make sure each one is optimised and has a unique title, description and meta to avoid any potential duplicate content issues.

If you’ve already got attribute URLs and want to get rid of them.

Go into Products > Attributes and then into each attribute, uncheck the Enable Archives checkbox, and update the attribute.

If you want to be super careful about SEO.

Check Google Analytics or Search Console to see if these attribute archives deliver any traffic.

If they are, you could choose to keep them.

If you are still left with questions, consider one of our WordPress SEO Reviews.