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- October 5, 2025
Last night I spoke at The Magento Smackdown in Manchester. My first time presenting at a developer event. I’m used to standing in front of SEOs and marketers, so walking into a room packed with Magento developers felt very different.
The event itself was classic Smackdown style. Thrown together quickly, hosted by PushON, sponsored by Hypernode, held in the basement of Northern Monk in the Northern Quarter. Loud, informal, and full of people ready for a few pints and some straight-talking talks.
Photo taken by Duncan Soutar, I’m sat down there with the Dark Matter Commerce t-shirt. Speaker – Fareed Patel.
My slot was Some Dirty Tech SEO for Magento. Twenty minutes, around 45 slides, lots of visuals and memes, but all tied to practical SEO wins that can influence the bottom line.
I structured the talk around three areas:
The first section was all about performance at the edge. Magento sites can be slow, and waiting months for dev sprints to land fixes is the norm. Edge SEO has been creeping into the mainstream, and I wanted to show how it can be used for quick results.
Cloudflare Workers are a perfect example. They let you cache third-party scripts at the edge and serve them from your own domain. That simple shift can take an LCP-heavy request and cut it down massively. In my slides, I showed a before-and-after example where serving scripts from the edge made the page load around three times faster.
It’s not just Workers. Similar tricks can be done on Fastly, and you can extend the idea to schema injection, header rewrites, or internal link tweaks. The point is that SEOs don’t have to sit back feeling powerless when performance issues get stuck in backlog. Edge SEO gives you levers to pull right now.
The second section hit on something every Magento SEO knows too well: crawl bloat from layered navigation.
Googlebot loves to follow every filter combination, and before you know it there are millions of URLs in your logs that add no value. I showed an example where crawl bloat quietly cost over 100k impressions a day.
The usual methods like robots.txt, nofollow, or canonical tags don’t fully solve the problem. Robots.txt stops crawling but not indexing, so you get index bloat. Canonical tags are often ignored. Noindex still eats crawl budget.
My dirty workaround is simple. Let the first filter generate a crawlable URL so Google can understand the structure. Then render further filters as buttons or JS triggers instead of links. Users get the same experience, but bots don’t drown in endless concatenated variants.
It’s not always essential, but when crawl bloat is out of control, this is a practical way to rein it in without a massive development project.
The final section was about something shiny and new. Everyone in SEO seems to be talking about AI right now, so I switched it up and talked about MCPs – specifically the new Chrome DevTools MCP.
It’s a centralised platform that unifies multiple data sources into one interface, with chat-based queries, on-demand reporting, and performance insights. For SEOs it means we can run lab-based simulations, trace performance waterfalls, and check Core Web Vitals in real time.
I showed how it can be used for both performance analysis and SEO auditing:
It’s still early days, but I love it already. Having SEO auditing tools baked into DevTools feels like the start of something powerful for our workflows.
Speaking to a developer audience forced me to cut the fluff. You can’t just say “Google prefers this” and leave it there. You have to show the problem, show the fix, and tie it to results.
That’s a good thing. It makes you sharper. It pushes SEOs to speak the same language as developers. And in the conversations afterwards, that came through. Devs shared their pain points with Magento URLs and script performance. SEOs admitted how often comms fall short. Sharing that middle ground is where collaboration gets stronger.
The Magento Smackdown was my first developer-focused speaking event. I enjoyed it, I learned from it, and I want to do more. If anything, talking to developers makes me a better marketer. It forces clarity and shows where SEO really overlaps with code.
Big thanks to PushON for putting it together, Hypernode for backing it, and to everyone who packed out the basement at Northern Monk.
If you want to flick through the slides, here’s the deck: Speakerdeck – Some Dirty Tech SEO for Magento.
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