Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Different page for each product colour?
-
Hi Guys,
I've just read an ecommerce article that suggests it's a good idea to have a different page for each colour that the product comes in. However surely this will mean duplicate content?
What are your thoughts? Have you put this tactic into motion and how did it go?
Thanks,
Dan
-
That's really interesting. I strongly believe that one page for each variation of a product, whether it's color or size, worsens user experience. But I'm working against a near-religious devotion to having as many pages as possible on the site, based on the idea that more pages definitely means better SEO. Any tips for overcoming that?
-
That will only be an advantage if you have a lot of search volume using colors so you can actually have the color name embedded better in the on-page optimisation for each product.
On the other hand it is duplicate content as the pages are mainly the same - you can play with alternate and canonicals and some advantage will still come from the other pages but it's a hassle.
I would strongly suggest to have the colors on one single product page (unless the color plays a huge role (as far as search volume).
Just an add-on opinion - hope it helps.
-
It would mean duplicated content if you kept the description the same, yep. However, there are many ways of saying the same thing... You would have to rewrite the descriptions for sure.
Whether or not it would give your website any benefit is hard to say without knowing which product it was you were thinking about splitting down and which keywords you were targeting for that product.
As an example. One of the sites I am working on sells plastic chains. We optimise the category page for the main plastic chain keywords, within the category we add the products and split them up based on colour. This allows us to target long-tail keywords such as "Green Plastic Chain". This benefits us because (even though they are fairly low) there are people searching for this term. If nobody is searching for your product in a specific colour then there is no real advantage other than having more content on your site.
On the other side of the coin, it does mean more clicks for visitors. As we know, more clicks often means losing visitors. The only real answer is to test test test. I always recommend using a combination of both methods after lots of testing and analysing.
Hope this helps?
Matt
-
From experience, I would highly recommend combining multiple colours onto one page and having an option to select colour, and update photos if required.
We have spent the best part of a year combining variations of products to reduce product pages from 18,000+ to under 1000 and have seen very good SERP improvements because more of the site is being indexed, and there is less duplicate content.
At the end of the day, if nothing changes about a product other than its colour, or size etc then it does not need its own page - it doesn't benefit a user to have 2 pages to browse to make their colour selection.
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
-
Value of using spaces or no spaces on product category page varient keywords
Hello, all fellow Mozzers,
On-Page Optimization | | JamesDavison
I have taken over a project and this account, so can't change the username according to MOZ.🙃 We run an eCommerce website, and to me, some of the content is conflicting as some pages have more information content than what I would put in a commerce page, but this is how the boss wants it to work, personally, I would separate the content out.
The page I'm working on:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/205-70-14.html
and this is an example of the rest of these types of pages, I will be tackling:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/125-15.html I was tasked to improve SEO ranking, when using the MOZ page grader I had a score of 24 out of 27 83% SEO score and 3-page problems. 7th position in Google for the search term 205/70 R14 As it is a generic product listing page, It was pointless to add to the URL and the Internal links I can't reduce as these are links to products, so I went to reduce the
keyword stuffing and making the page content more natural, this improved the page to 25 out of 27, 87% SEO score and 2-page problems. Improvement to 3rd position in Google, but he wants to chase 1st place to be above his competitors, which is fair enough. It turns out that in the past, they have used this type of page to try and get a high ranking for several search terms, as it is a different variation on a tyre size terms are:
205/70 R14, 205/70R14, 205/70 R 14
205/70 X 14, 205/70X14, 205/70 X14
and so on for all the different ways you can search for this tyre size. He is also convinced Google will see these as different search terms, and while I agree to an extent, this causes Keyword Stuffing on the page, which in turn was harming the rankings. Each product listed on the page already has its own title 205/70 R14, 205/70 HR14 and so on, so my question is. What is the best practice for writing content on these types of pages to gain high rankings for several Keywords, and what value does writing the same keyword with spaces and no spaces have? Any help or advice is welcome, so I have a better understanding of how to approach this for this page and the rest of the site. Cheers Mal0 -
What is the best meta description for Category Pages, Tag Pages and Main Article?
Hi, I want to index all my categories and tags. But I fear about duplicating the meta description. for example: I have a tag name "Learn Stock Market", a category name "Learning", and a main article "What is Stock Market". What is your suggestion for meta description of these three pages that looks great for seo google?
On-Page Optimization | | mbmozmb0 -
Getting the Titles and Headings Right on Product Pages. Userbility vs SEO
Hey Mozzers, I am optimising a chaotic section of the site including many similar products. Writing unique content etc. The titles and urls were all over the place so my first job was to tidy them up so I could make some sense of the situation, especially as sometimes they didn't even match! I should point out were on Magento, so product name = Both the Heading and Title of the page, the meta title can be set separately. When i refer to title I mean both <title>and <h1></strong><br /><br />Before they existed as such<br />URL: domain.com/200-x-0-5-g-rs-232-balance.html<br />TItle: PC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br /><br />This format was (Product Code, Capacities, Resolutions, Accuracy, Product Title)<br /><br />The issue was all 60 products in a page followed this format. Navigating through the page was a nightmare and was just a jumble of numbers and highly confusing even to me who learnt what they all mean, especially when you had 8 products from the same range you got presented with<br /><br />APC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1235 500 x 1g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1236 1000 x 2g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1238 5000 x 10g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1239 10000 x 15g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1210 20000 x 25g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1211 50000 x 50g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance</p> <p>I changed them to something more user friendly.<br /><br />URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />This has seen the following benefits<br />- URL is now clear and means something to the user<br />- Product titles are easy to navigate and the page is more pleasing to the eye<br />- The jumble of numbers in the title are now all labelled and shown below each product listing in bullet point so the user can see the basic spec of a product without having to decipher any titles<br /><br />Upon reflection I has a couple of concerns I was hoping you could discuss, I am wondering if I have made the titles too simple.<br />1) I have no product code in the title<br />We have our own products manufactured and sell existing brands with their own product codes. Some of these can be lengthy. Adding them makes them hard to the eye and the page looked cramped.<br /><br />The codes are listed beneath each product title on category pages and on a list on the actual product page, but no where in the titles. <br /><br />2)None of our products have a brand listed in the title<br />None of the products on the site had brand names in anything but the images when i started and as such it snuck under my radar. But should i pre-fix all titles with a brand name?<br /><br />Should </p> <p>URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance</p> <p>become</p> <p>URL: domain.com/BRAND1-200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: BRAND1 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />My instinct tells me to change things to include brands as its useful to the customer and should have an SEO benefit, but to leave out product codes as they are accessible to the customer where they are now and dont make things messy and unreadable.<br /><br />As always, thanks for the input!</p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | ATP0 -
Why do I have 2 different URL's for the same page - is this good practice?
Hi GuysMy father is currently using a programmer to build his new site. Knowing a little about SEO etc, I was a little suspicious of the work carried out. **Anyone with good programming and SEO knowledge, please offer your advice!**This page http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/gallery-range-wood-flooring/ which is soon to be http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/ you'll see has a number of different products. The products on this particular page have been built into colour categories like thishttp://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/beiges http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks This is fine. Eventually when we add to our selection of woods, we'll easily segment each product into "colour categories" for users to easily navigate to. My question is - Why do I have 2 different URL's for the same page - is this good practice? Please see below... Visible URL - http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns/cipressa/Below is the permalink seen in Word Press for this page also.Permalink: http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/and in the Word Press snippet shows the same permalink urlCipressa | Engineered Brown Wood | The Wood Gallerieswww.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/browns-engineered-wood/cipressa/ Buy Cipressa Engineered Brown Wood, available at The Wood Galleries, London. Provides an Exceptional Foundation for Elegant Décor, Extravagant .. If this is completely ok and has no negative search impact - then I'm happy. If not what should I advise to my programmer to do? Your help would be very much appreciated. Regards Faye
On-Page Optimization | | Faye2340 -
Add content as blog post or to product pages?
Hi, We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product. The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless. Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
On-Page Optimization | | azu25
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product. I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages). From what I can see, here are the pros and cons: Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership.. Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords.. I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks! [EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...0 -
Home page or landing page?
Hello, I want to ask a question related to that - Should we put keywords in the home page title if we wish to position another landing page better for particular keywords? I have read in one website about SEO that it's good the main keywords of your website to be positioned in homepage title also. f.e. Let's say we have website about web-design and our company is named Company Ltd. The title of the home page is "Company Ltd. - Web design, SEO, etc" We have also another inner page named "Web design | Company Ltd.". So should we leave the first page name only "Company Ltd." and the landing page's name "Web design | Company Ltd." . I don't know if they both have the same keyword in their title they won't compete with each other.
On-Page Optimization | | HrishikeshKarov0 -
Related products - random products or static
Hello, I was curious about where to get related products from. Currently I just grab some random products from the same category. Would there be any benefit to always linking to the same related products on a product page? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | nux0 -
Page speed tools
Working on reducing page load time, since that is one of the ranking factors that Google uses. I've been using Page Speed FireFox plugin (requires FireBug), which is free. Pretty happy with it but wondering if others have pointers to good tools for this task. Thanks...
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0