How Does Luigi’s Box Affect the SEO of Your Website?

Luigi’s Box products takes your website’s visitors’ engagement and user experience to a whole new level. However, since our tools are not an original part of your customer’s websites, it’s legitimate to ask about their impact on your rankings in search engines.

That’s why we decided to answer the most common questions related to Luigi’s Box effect on search engine optimization.

1. Does Luigi’s Box affect the speed of the website?
2. Does Luigi’s Box affect the indexing of the website?
3. Does Luigi’s Box affect the crawl budget?
4. Does Luigi’s Box affect the visual stability of the website?

So, Does Luigi’s Box Affect SEO?

The short answer is: no, it does not. The long answer would be: No, it does not. But…

Meaning the opposite is the truth. Luigi’s Box could have a very positive impact on your SEO, if:

1. The right integration process is chosen. The good news is our team of integration specialists is here to select the right integration method and help you set up everything to be 100% SEO-friendly from scratch.
2. Your website follows standard SEO guidelines for e-commerce categories. The good news is that you should have to follow them anyways.

As you can guess, if one of the following criteria is not met, it could also lead to some complications. So let’s explain how to prevent them.

Page Speed

Page speed is one of the parameters to which Google has started to attribute more value in influencing the websites’ ranking in the last few years. It became even more prominent as a part of Core Web Vitals (CWV), which was introduced as a ranking factor in 2020. But it also has a great impact on user experience and engagement in the first place.

Luigi’s Box tools impact page load speed from minor to zero. As already has been mentioned before, the final outcome depends mainly on the integration method. There are two basic ways: backend or frontend integration (Well, four, actually, since there is also mixed and hybrid integration, but let’s skip them for now). Let’s see how it works from an SEO perspective.

Backend integration

Backend integration is often used for more demanding websites and mobile applications. It could be done easily by changing the API call to Luigi’s Box API and updating the filters for rendering.

If you are about to choose backend integration, you don’t have to read any further. It has zero impact on page speed if made correctly.

Frontend integration

This method allows configuring the most advanced features for clients via integrating with Luigi’s Box API and using our frontend libraries.

The advantage of this method lies in a slightly smoother experience.

The downside of this method is a possible minor slow-down of page load speed.

However, our test with Google Lighthouse shows that Luigi’s Box tools do not affect the page speed on desktop devices (actually even improved the speed) and affect the page speed on mobile devices only insignificantly.

A slight decrease in page load time does not mean the worst ranking, especially when other ranking factor is improved.

Visual stability

Visual stability could be a potential problem with tools such as recommender or product banners, affecting Core Web Vital’s metrics Cumulative Layout Shift.

The solution is to create placeholders to put such widgets on the website and avoid problems with rendering from the start.

Therefore our integration specialists are always present in the process to avoid such problems from the beginning.

Therefore we recommend avoiding integration purely on your site. However, this does not apply to our Self-Service Integrations via Plugins for platforms such as Shoptet and Shopify, where our tools are well-optimized for this purpose.

Indexing

One of the usual worries of our customers lies in indexing filtered pages in categories or search result pages. There are three common concerns that we usually talk about:

1. Product Listing will dynamically change the content of the page, which will cause problems for the SEO
2. Product Listing will dynamically change the page’s content and cause rendering problems, especially with javascript stepping into the game.
3. Filtered and search result pages will be indexed, creating duplicates and reducing the crawl budget.

Indexing issue 1: Changing the content of a page

Luigi’s Box Product Listing does not affect the content of the category pages. All the magic lies in the dynamic rendering of the product tiles listed in the category.

Page URLs, titles, headlines, text descriptions, and other elements crucial for indexing and ranking the page in search engines are not affected at all.

Note that the order of the products is not important for indexing, as far as category page pagination is done correctly.

Indexing issue 2: Rendering / javascript indexation

The usual hypothesis is that Luigi’s Box Product Listing feature could cause rendering problems since it uses javascript. Let us explain why this could possibly be a problem.

All of the pages are rendered by the browser. Not only for users to see the actual content but also for crawlers, such as Google bots, to index it. The thing is, the HTML code your server is sending to the browser does not always represent the final appearance of the website.

Though it is not a problem for the user, let’s say the crawler might get a bit suspicious about the discrepancies and need a full picture. That’s why he will wait till rendering finishes and do the second wave of indexation, causing delays that are bad for SEO.

Well, this is not quite a problem with Luigi’s Box. Two reasons for that:

1. While this problem has been common in the past, Google made great progress towards indexing the javascript content in the past years. Using partial javascript to generate product tiles does not affect the indexing of the whole page significantly.
2. Luigi’s Box does not necessarily have to use JavaScript. We use it only to render part of the page (product tiles) in case of frontend integration.

And of course, there are two common solutions for that:

1. Server-side rendering

This means that all the magic will happen at the client’s server, sending the already rendered content to the browser.

So, no delays, no problems.

The advantage is that you will put all the burden on the customer’s server, which makes rendering faster for all. The disadvantage is that you will put all the burden on the customer’s server, which also makes it more demanding in terms of server load and costs.

2. Dynamic / Hybrid rendering

This method solves the problem with the higher server load. How does it work? Simply put, you show something else to the crawler and the user in this method. While rendering for the crawler will take place on the server side, rendering for the users will take place at the front end.

Indexing issue 3: Duplicate content

Another usual suspect when discussing the possible impact of our tools on SEO is content duplication with product filters and search.

Here is the hypothesis: By using the faceted filters in the category page or creating a results page using a search, the crawlers create and index a new URL. Since there are almost infinite possibilities for filtering combinations and search queries, this will significantly decrease the crawl budget and negatively impact the rankings.

It’s not gonna happen. And here’s why.

1. Luigi’s Box faceted filters and search are not creating unique URLs. Unless you want to, our tool adds parameters to existing URLs (dynamic URLs), not creating unique ones. Let’s say the user visits the category page “/sneakers” and filters size-44 Nikes in red color. Instead of creating a new page, Luigi’s Box adds a parameter to the existing page, let’s say: “/sneakers?lb.f%brand=nike&colour=red&size=44”.
2. Those pages are orphans. Technically, URLs with the parameters could be indexed. You need to send a crawler/bot to a particular page for this. And to find such a page, the crawler needs a link, which is not provided by search or faceted filters. In other words, the crawler does not have any chance to find and index this kind of page.
3. You can still tell crawlers to don’t index those pages.

So, what can you do to ensure your page will not get indexed?

Set canonical URL

The easiest way how to prevent crawlers from indexing filtered pages is to set the canonical URL via the rel=’canonical’ tag.

Canonical is a tag that will indicate to crawlers which page is original and should be indexed and which pages are only other variations of that page (such as filtered pages, paginated pages, etc.).

Set no index tag

No index tag will tell crawlers that this particular page shouldn’t be indexed at all. So you can possibly use them in filtered pages but also in Search result pages.

Example of tag: <meta name= “robots” content= “noindex”/>

Disallow bots via robots.txt

The last option is to disallow crawlers from visiting certain pages and indexing them by listing them in the robots.txt file.

However, this is unnecessary and usually also not applicable due to the wide variety and volume of the pages. Also, most filtered URLs share the same root as the original page.

The possible use case is to prevent indexing search result pages or unique filtered pages when the URL structure allows it.

Example situation 1:

Search results page URL string always contains “/search”

Disallow: /search

Example situation 2:

The applied product filter in the category always creates a unique URL (not only the parameters) that directly contains the parameter variable in the URL. For example /sneakers/size:44

Disallow: /sneakers/size*

User Experience

While rightfully focusing on debugging possible risks, we can remember that tools such as Luigi’s Box mainly aim to improve website performance with better usability and experience.

Besides other advantages, improving user experience plays a significant role in ranking in search engines. In 2020, Google introduced Page Experience along with Core Web Vitals as an official ranking factor.

Based on the segment, from 30% to 40% of users will leave the website in case of no-search results. Prevent them from doing so with a more accurate and faster search experience.

Almost 90% of customers are interested only in products on the first page of results. Well, don’t give them a reason to leave by not finding the relevant products on the product listing page.

Improving engagement and usability could have a similar impact on SEO as great website architecture, quality content, or fast page load.

Frequently asked questions