Magento Smackdown - Some Dirty Tech SEO for Magento

Expect TechSEO tips, workarounds, and practical wins that influence the bottom line.

One of my agenda points is the shiny new DevTools MCP. I’ve been digging into it already, and I love what it brings for performance analysis and SEO auditing.

📍 Northern Monk Refectory basement, Northern Quarter
🕕 Thursday Oct 2 – 6pm start, til late

Transcript

1. Some Dirty Tech SEO for Magento Chris Lever
2. Introduction Chris Lever - Head of Technical SEO @ Bring Digital (we’re rebranding to Glass Atlas with Space 48 & others soon) Started out as an professional SEO back in 2011 Co-founder of TechSEO North
3. 1. Speed & Performance - Edge SEO 2. Taming the Crawl Bloat - Googlebot edition 3. DevTools MCP - Bleeding-edge SEO Agenda
4. Speed & Performance - Edge SEO (Cloudflare Workers)
5. Speed & Performance Is Edge SEO finally going mainstream? Answer: YES
6. Speed & Performance Origin Server User’s Browser Cloudflare Edge + Workers Middleware
7. Speed & Performance
8. Speed & Performance “Workers can modify and respond to HTTP requests”
9. Speed & Performance Example Caching Third-party Scripts on the Edge
10. Speed & Performance Often the worst Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) offenders are caused by third-party scripts. Sometimes as an SEO you can feel powerless.
11. Speed & Performance
12. Speed & Performance
13. Speed & Performance Third-party script
14. Speed & Performance - Caching Third-party Scripts Asset is now served from your domain
15. Speed & Performance Before
16. Speed & Performance After That’s a ~63% improvement (or 3× faster) just by serving from your own domain + CF Cache.
17. Speed & Performance This can also be done on Fastly’s Compute serverless functions. Although not as straightforward as Cloudflare Workers.
18. Speed & Performance - Best Practices ➔ Not every HTTP request needs a Worker ➔ Avoid running Workers on non-HTML assets ➔ Keep executions focused on key SEO tasks ➔ Always test before launching changes
19. Speed & Performance - What Else? Schemas Datalayers Tracking Scripts Meta Robots Internal Linking Caching HTTP Headers Technical SEO hacks on the Edge are quick, dirty and powerful.
20. Taming the Crawl Bloat - Googlebot edition
21. Taming the Crawl Bloat Have you seen Googlebot behaviour like this?
22. Taming the Crawl Bloat Googlebot got greedy and discovered +7 million URLs This is called Crawl Bloat
23. Taming the Crawl Bloat Uncontrolled facets can quietly cost you 100k+ impressions a day.
24. Taming the Crawl Bloat 1, Robots.txt Disallow 2, Nofollow 3, Noindex 4, Noindex, Nofollow 5, Canonical Tags 6, Blend of above Popular methods for controlling crawlers & bots
25. Taming the Crawl Bloat Robots.txt is not a shield Blocking in robots.txt stops crawl, but not indexing. This is called Index Bloat
26. Taming the Crawl Bloat Googlebot doesn’t fully respect nofollow
27. Taming the Crawl Bloat Googlebot doesn’t always respect canonical tags Still wastes Crawl Budget
28. Taming the Crawl Bloat Noindex still wastes Crawl Budget
29. Taming the Crawl Bloat Cleaning up the crawl & index bloat
30. Taming the Crawl Bloat Temporary drop Disallow rule, add noindex, nofollow to the page. Pattern-based blocking in robots.txt after the first query parameter. Index Bloat Crawl Bloat
31. Taming the Crawl Bloat Googlebot doesn’t browse like a user - it hits a URL, stores the links, and crawls them randomly. Look for early clusters in your server logs to trace where the mess began. Use GSC to determine the date.
32. Taming the Crawl Bloat Concatenated filters = crawl bloat Each filter click creates a new URL. Stack them together and bots can waste crawl budget on endless variants. Quick fix Let the first filter create a crawlable URL with <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /> After that, render further filters as buttons or JS triggers. Why it matters Google only needs a single filter URL per PLP to better understand your structure. Anything more is crawl waste. Takeaway Keep UX the same, but stop bots from eating your crawl budget. Use this approach if robots.txt and meta robots are not robust enough. 1st filter 2nd+ filter
33. Chrome Devtools MCP Every SEO seems to be talking about AI… so let’s switch it up and talk MCPs
34. Chrome Devtools MCP - Bleeding Edge Technical SEO
35. In Short: A centralised platform that unifies multiple data sources into one interface. Enables natural-language queries via chat and on-demand report generation. Think: • Conversational access (chat & voice) • Extensible tool integration • Real-time data retrieval • Automated reporting What is a MCP Server?
36. Chrome DevTools MCP
37. Chrome DevTools MCP The is bleeding Edge Technical SEO The DevTools MCP provides debugging tools and performance insights for single or multiple webpages. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-devtools-mcp
38. Chrome DevTools MCP https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/mcp
39. Chrome DevTools MCP LAB Data Simulation
40. Chrome DevTools MCP LAB Data Simulation
41. Chrome DevTools MCP Dirty fix: Bake in a full checklist within your MCP prompt! LAB Data Simulation
42. Chrome DevTools MCP - Partytown Web Workers https://partytown.qwik.dev/magento2/ Examples of third-party scripts that are well suited to run inside a Partytown web worker include: • Google Tag Manager (GTM) • Google Analytics (GA) • Facebook Pixel • Mixpanel • Hubspot • Segment • Amplitude
43. Chrome DevTools MCP Lazy Loading Performance Analysis
44. Chrome DevTools MCP Local Overrides
45. Chrome DevTools MCP - What Else? Performance Analysis • Monitor Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) in real-time (Lab based simulation) • Run performance traces with waterfall analysis • Identify slow resources and oversized assets • Measure JavaScript blocking time and long tasks • Quantify third-party script performance impact • Test on throttled CPU/network conditions • Audit missing resource hints (preconnect/dns-prefetch) [TESTED] • Check image optimisation and lazy loading SEO Auditing • Validate meta tags, titles, and OG data • Analyse heading hierarchy (H1-H6) • Extract and verify JSON-LD structured data • Audit internal/external link distribution • Test JavaScript rendering impact on content • Verify canonical and hreflang tags • Check robots directives and headers • Test mobile responsiveness and viewport behaviour
46. Search Eventbrite “TechSEO North” for Free Tickets
47. https://speakerdeck.com/chrisleverseo