[e-commerce] Should I index product variants?
-
Hi guys,
I have e-commerce site, that sells car tires. I was wondering would I benefit from making all Product Variants ( for example each tire size ) as different page, that has link to the main product to provide some affiliation, or should I make each variant noindex, and add rel=canonical to the main product.
The benefits from having each variant indexed can be many:
-
greater click through rate
-
more relative results for customers
-
etc.
But I'm not sure how to handle the duplicate content issue ( in this case, only the title, URL and H1 can be different ).
Regards.
-
-
I agree with Mat on this one. Also, building links to one page and making it stronger can lead to it ranking well for those same long-tail terms that are only in the on-page copy instead of in the page titles.
Also, I think the one page approach is a better experience for the users.
-
Unless you can genuinely and legitimately justify unique content for each I would either canonical them from the start or better still get them on one page.
I know it sounds like an easy long-tail win, but it can go horribly wrong. I'm currently working on a site that is being heavily penalised as a result of a similar approach and we're having a nightmare getting the thin content out of the index.
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 to handle brand description on product pages?
Hi Mozzers, Hope you're doing good. I have a content placement related question. Assume, I have 1000 products of brand A, 1000 of brand B, and so on. Now, if I want to put brand specific 200-words description on each of these product pages. I'm creating duplicate content across the site by putting absolutely same brand description on these product pages i.e brand A description on first 1000 pages, brand B description on next 1000 products and so on. Looking for an expert advice around placement of content here i.e how can I add brand description on product pages and avoid duplicate content penalty? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After
Hi there, I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
The site is www.consumerbase.com. We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed. I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT! A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages. Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad. http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them. I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able. What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.0 -
Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
Hi all, I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool). The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either: canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages, or request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days) What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | byoung860 -
Sudden Index drop, but traffic increased?
Here are the numbers- Pages submitted on sitemap- About 18k Total Pages indexed on 12/30- About 250k Total Pages indexed on 1/6- About 81k We made no site changes in that week, why the sudden drop? Also why is total pages indexed so much higher than sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
E-commerce Adding New Content - Blog vs New Page
I have an ecommerce site (www.brick-anew.com) focused on Fireplace products and we also have a separate blog (fireplacedecorating.com) focused on fireplace decorating. My ecommerce site needs new content, pages, internal links, etc... for more Google love, attention, and rankings. My question is this: Should I add a blog to the ecommerce site for creating new content or should I just add and create new pages? I have lots of ideas for relevant new content related to fireplaces. Are there any SEO benefits to a blog over new static pages? Thanks! SAM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SammyT0 -
How to have pages re-indexed
Hi, my hosting company has blocked one my web site seeing it has performance problem. Result of that, it is now reactivated but my pages had to be reindexed. I have added my web site to Google Webmaster tool and I have submitted my site map. After few days it is saying: 103 number of URLs provided 39 URLs indexed I know Google doesn't promesse to index every page but do you know any way to increase my chance to get all my pages indexed? By the way, that site include pages and post (blog). Thanks for your help ! Nancy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0 -
Why are so many pages indexed?
We recently launched a new website and it doesn't consist of that many pages. When you do a "site:" search on Google, it shows 1,950 results. Obviously we don't want this to be happening. I have a feeling it's effecting our rankings. Is this just a straight up robots.txt problem? We addressed that a while ago and the number of results aren't going down. It's very possible that we still have it implemented incorrectly. What are we doing wrong and how do we start getting pages "un-indexed"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Image optimization for e-commerce
Regarding image optimization for an ecommerce site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | triplelootz
In your "category" pages you list your products with a small thumbnails / miniature image. When the user clicks on the product name or on the thumnails, he lands on the product page with the real size product image. How do you optimize the thumbnail image? Do you use a different ALT? Is Google smart enough to index the real size image? On one hand the image located on the "product" page has lot more content around, is bigger & more interesting for both the user and Google. On the other hand the "category" page has more autority ( links) than the product page... To reformulate my questions: Do you think ALT tag is important for your thumbnail image on your category pages. Do you write different ALT tag for your thumbnail image ( on your category pages) & and your real size image (on your product page)? Which ALT tag / image do you think is the most interesting for Google? What do you think? Cheers, Ludo0