What to do with eCommerce site with color variations of the same product?
-
On our eCommerce website we sell products that each have about 20 color variations. When the site was built each color variation was added individually instead as a single product with a configurable color option. Would it be best to combine the different variations into a single product with a configurable drop down menu for color or to leave as is? I am worried the search engines see the individual product pages for each color as duplicate content. What are your thoughts on how Zappos handles color variations? On the category page they display each color variation as an individual product but when the product is clicked it goes to a single product page with the different configurable color variations.
Thanks
-
We have this across about 30,000 products (yea, that many). I can't stress enough how much of a duplicate page/title content mess it can become. If your system allows for canonical and pagination it's totally worth the effort.
-
Depends how the products are displayed. Are your products all under one single URL or is it something like site.com/product/?color=red color=blue, etc? If so, Google sees these as separate pages.
If one have one URL (even if it's AJAX driven), you should be fine. If you have multiple URLs, you need to canonical down to one, or else you will get hit with a duplicate content penalty. You could also remove them as you suggest. Just be sure to 301 redirect your products so you don't lose much SEO benefit.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How long does google takes to crawl a single site ?
lately i have been thinking , when a crawler visits an already visited site or indexed site, whats the duration of its scanning?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
I'm Pulling Hairs! - Duplicate Content Issue on 3 Sites
Hi, I'm an SEO intern trying to solve a duplicate content issue on three wine retailer sites. I have read up on the Moz Blog Posts and other helpful articles that were flooded with information on how to fix duplicate content. However, I have tried using canonical tags for duplicates and redirects for expiring pages on these sites and it hasn't fixed the duplicate content problem. My Moz report indicated that we have 1000s of duplicates content pages. I understand that it's a common problem among other e-commerce sites and the way we create landing pages and apply dynamic search results pages kind of conflicts with our SEO progress. Sometimes we'll create landing pages with the same URLs as an older landing page that expired. Unfortunately, I can't go around this problem since this is how customer marketing and recruitment manage their offers and landing pages. Would it be best to nofollow these expired pages or redirect them? Also I tried to use self-referencing canonical tags and canonical tags that point to the higher authority on search results pages and even though it worked for some pages on the site, it didn't work for a lot of the other search result pages. Is there something that we can do to these search result pages that will let google understand that these search results pages on our site are original pages? There are a lot of factors that I can't change and I'm kind of concerned that the three sites won't rank as well and also drive traffic that won't convert on the site. I understand that Google won't penalize your sites with duplicate content unless it's spammy. So If I can't fix these errors -- since the company I work conducts business where we won't ever run out of duplicate content -- Is it worth going on to other priorities in SEO like Keyword research, On/Off page optimization? Or should we really concentrate on fixing these technical issues before doing anything else? I'm curious to know what you think. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | drewstorys0 -
Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?
Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
Algorithm Updates | | Inevo
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂0 -
Moving Main Site from HTTP to HTTPS: Seeking Quick Items to Consider
Hey Mozzers!
Algorithm Updates | | WhiteboardCreations
We're going to be moving are main company site from http://whiteboardcreations.com > https://whiteboardcreations.com and wanted to get some of your quick tips for items we need to consider. We are working on a new web redesign now and keeping in WordPress. A couple facts for your info... We have read a lot about it, but wanted to get some quick tips we need to take into account from your points of view. 1. March 2010 domain age
2. Ranks very well locally for our targeted keywords around web design, WordPress, SEO, social media, blog writing, web maintenance
3. Not many of our competitors, especially the SEO competitors, have moved to HTTPS
4. Site is hosted at WP Engine
5. Going to be purchasing a Domain Validated SSL... Is there any advantage to an Extended Validated SSL in Google's eye/mind?
6. Should we expect rank decrease or increase?
7. Anything else we should expect or prepare for from your experiences? Thank you!
Patrick0 -
Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?
We own a horoscope website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios. I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.
Algorithm Updates | | websitebuilder0 -
Canonical when using others sites
Hi all, I was wondering if this is a good way to safely have content on our website. We have a job search website, and we pull content from other sites. We literally copy the full content text from it's original source, and paste it on our own site on an individual job page. On every individual job page we put a canonical link to the original source (which is not my own website). On each job page, when someone wants to apply, they are redirected to the original job source. As far as I know this should be safe. But since it's not our website we are canonical linking to, will this be a problem? To compare it was indeed.com does, they take 1 or 2 senteces from the original source and put it as an excerpt on their job category page (ie "accountant in new york" category page). When you click the excerpt/title you are redirected to the original source. As you might know, indeed.com has very good rankings, with almost no original content whatsoever. The only thing that is unique is the URL of the indeed.com category where it's on (indeed.com/accountant-new-york), and sometimes the job title. Excerpt is always duplicate from other sites. Why does this work so well? Will this be a better strategy for us to rank well?
Algorithm Updates | | mrdjdevil0 -
Difference between Google's link: operator and GWT's links to your sites
I haven't used the Google operator link: for a while, and I noticed that there is a big disparity between the operator "link:" and the GWT's links to your site. I compared these results on a number of websites, my own and competitors, and the difference seem to be the same across the board. Has Google made a recent change with how they display link results via the operator? Could this be an indication that they are clean out backlinks?
Algorithm Updates | | tdawson090 -
Do links from unrelated sites dilute your rankings for your key phrases?
do links from unrelated sites dilute your rankings for your key phrases? i've always heard don't get links from unrelated sites but if that mattered, then how would sites with totally diverse pages such as newspaper sites, sears, and other catalogue sites rank for these diverse subjects on their site? How does Facebook rank when it gets 100,000 links a day from sites that have nothing to do with a social media site? I'd love to hear everyone's opinion on this. Also, Do links from unrelated sites give less push than related links? Take care,
Algorithm Updates | | Ron10
Ron0