Technical SEO Consultant, Poland

Polish letters, encoding and the special case of ł

Polish uses a set of letters with diacritics, and slug generators handle them less uniformly than people assume. Most slug routines strip accents by splitting a letter into its base and its mark, then dropping the mark. That works for ą, ć, ę, ń, ó, ś, ź and ż. It does not work for ł, which has no such split in Unicode. Depending on the routine, ł is kept, dropped or converted only if someone added an explicit rule. The result is URLs such as zoty instead of zloty, or a mix of both across the site.

Older Polish systems add a second risk. Some ERP and sales software, and many exported spreadsheets, still use older Central European character sets rather than UTF-8. When that data reaches the website without conversion, Polish letters arrive as garbled symbols in product names, titles and structured data, and eventually in the snippets shown on results pages.

The checks I run:

• A crawl that flags URLs, titles and descriptions containing garbled sequences or missing letters.
• A test of the slug generator with every Polish letter, in both cases.
• Comparison of the forms used in sitemaps, canonicals, hreflang and internal links.
• Import settings for every feed, so the character set is declared correctly.

The outcome is a short rule set your developers enforce in code, with redirects from older variants where they exist. The technical SEO audit page describes how these checks fit into the full review.

Product data from the ERP, marketplaces and comparison feeds

In many Polish companies the same product data feeds several channels: the online store, a marketplace such as Allegro, price comparison services and sometimes B2B portals for wholesale customers. The data usually originates in an ERP or sales system and is shaped by whichever channel was set up first. That has technical consequences for the store.

• Titles built for another channel. Product names shortened or stuffed for a marketplace listing end up as page titles and headings on your own site.
• Identical descriptions everywhere. The same text on the store, the marketplace and partner shops gives search engines little reason to prefer your page.
• Variants as separate products. Each size or color exported as its own item, creating near-identical pages.
• Stock logic. Items withdrawn in the ERP remaining on the store as empty pages, or disappearing without a redirect.

Fixing these in the store alone rarely lasts, because the next import overwrites the change. The better route is mapping which ERP fields feed which page elements, then adding store-specific fields for titles and descriptions where needed. That mapping is an integration question, and it is where my ERP consulting in Poland meets search work. The commercial side of store content is covered on my ecommerce SEO page.

Filters, categories and crawl activity on large stores

Polish stores in building materials, auto parts, electronics, home and garden or industrial supplies can carry very large catalogs, and their navigation multiplies URLs quickly. Filters for brand, size, material, power, color and price, combined with sorting and pagination, can produce many times more URLs than there are products. Search engines spend visits on those combinations while new or updated products wait.

The first step is evidence. Server logs, where the hosting provider supplies them, show which URL patterns bots request and how often. Search Console's crawl stats and page indexing report add the search engine's view. Comparing the two with a crawl shows where activity is wasted.

Then each filter type gets a decision:

• Indexable landing pages for combinations people search for, such as a category by brand or by material, with their own title, short text and stable URL.
• Usable but not indexed combinations that help shoppers but would only create thin pages.
• Not crawled at all for sorting, view modes, session and tracking parameters.

Categories reachable through several paths, such as a product listed under three parent categories with three different URLs, get a single canonical path. Internal search result pages are kept out of the index. These rules are written into the platform configuration or custom code, depending on the store, and verified after release. The broader principles are on my technical SEO page.

Price display, structured data and Polish fonts

Polish stores have to present promotional prices carefully. EU consumer rules, applied in Poland, generally require showing the lowest price from a recent period when a price reduction is announced. Whatever wording and calculation your legal advisor approves, the technical side matters for search: the price in product markup must match the price a visitor sees, and promotional and reference prices must not confuse merchant listings. I check markup against visible content on product templates, following my schema markup consulting approach.

Mobile performance is the other big template-level topic. Store themes with large sliders, review widgets, live chat, several marketing tags and a consent platform can delay the main content and slow interaction. I start from real-visitor data per template and use lab tests to isolate causes. Your legal advisor sets the consent design under GDPR and Polish regulator guidance; once that is fixed, the loading order of scripts can usually still be improved. More detail sits under Core Web Vitals consulting.

Fonts deserve a specific check in Poland. Many web fonts are served in subsets, and the basic Latin subset does not include ą, ę, ł, ś or ż. Browsers then render those letters in a fallback font, so words look patched together, and the late swap can shift the layout. Loading a subset that includes the Latin Extended range fixes both problems.

Hosting in Poland suits domestic visitors; export versions benefit from a CDN.

Working with software houses, staging and releases

Poland has a deep pool of software houses and agencies, and many company sites and stores are built and maintained by one of them on a sprint basis. Technical SEO works best when it fits that rhythm rather than arriving as a large report once a year.

The working pattern I use with Polish development teams:

• An issue register grouped by cause and template, with example URLs for each item.
• Tickets in the team's own tracker format, stating the target behavior and how QA can confirm it.
• A planning call where priorities are set against effort, since some fixes are configuration and others need development.
• Checks on staging before release and a crawl in production afterwards, recorded in the register.

Staging environments need protection from indexing, and releases need a short regression checklist so a template change does not quietly remove canonicals, hreflang or markup. Sites built with React, Vue or other frameworks get a rendering comparison between server output and the rendered page, following the checks listed under JavaScript SEO. When the store moves to a new platform, the redirect map covers categories, products, filters worth keeping and image URLs, following SEO migration consulting.

All work is remote. Export structure and hreflang are covered on my international SEO page for Poland, the overall plan on my Polish SEO consulting page, and other services in the Poland hub.