Handling of product variations and colours in ecommerce
-
Hi,
our site prams.net has 72.000 crawled and only 2500 indexed urls according to deep crawl mainly due to colour variations (each colour has its own urls now). We now created 1 page per product, eg
http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini
and noindexed all the other ones, which had a positive effect on our seo.
http://www.prams.net/catalogsearch/result/?q=002.030.059.0
I might still hurt our crawl budget a lot that we have so many noindexed pages. The idea is now to redirect 301 all the colour pages to this main page and make them invisible. So google do not have to crawl them anymore, we included the variations in the product pages, so they should still be searchable for google and the user.
Does this make sense or is there a better solution out there? Does anyone have an idea if this will likely have a big or a small impact?
Thanks in advance.
Dieter
-
Whenever you have products that are similar (but only different in color variations or size variations), you should use the canonical tag to specify this. Keep these URLs indexed, but generally speaking the canonical tag is there to help in these situations.
There are literally thousands (or hundreds of thousands?) of sites using the canonical tag successfully.
-
Oleg,
thanks, do you have an example of somebody, who did this?
Thanks in advance
Dieter
-
Yes, that would do good. Since content is identical for each of these products, there should only be 1 URL with all of the variations of that product in order to consolidate all of the authority. If you want to keep all of the variations in search, look into creating anchor links that point to the same "master" url. e.g. http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini-buggy-lightweight-union-jack-b can be linked as http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini#union-jack
That way, the URL is the structure is more SEO friendly but aesthetically the site is identical.
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
-
Sale Pages On An eCommerce Website
I have a client who sells 50 brands of shoes. At the moment the developer has a noindex/nofollow tag on all sale pages which is wrong as around 10% of site activity revolves around those pages. The structure looks like this: 1. For Cats/Sub Cats site/sale
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nigel_Carr
site/womens/sale
site/womens/shoe/sale
site/womens/shoes/ballerinas/sale For every cat/subcat - there are 10 cats and average 5 subcats per cat so 50 pages of sale. 2. For Brands site/brand
site/brand/womens
site/sale/brand
site/sale/womens/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/subcat/brand So each brand can have four sale pages on top of its own brand page. 50 brands x 54 = around 2700. Now no one is going to start writing 2700 pieces of additional on page content (although Meta is OK! ) and we risk further diluting the brand pages we need to show highly for, so we need to do something. Should we Category Pages: 1. Allow all sale cat and subcat pages to proliferate through Google? or
2. Canonicalise all sale sub category pages back to category
3. Caonicalise all category and Subcategory pages back to sale/womens Brand Pages: 1. Allow all sale brand pages to proliferate through Google ?
2. Canonicalise Sub Cat brand pages back to sale/category/brand
3. Canonicalise Sub Cat and Cat back to sale/brand Note the lower pages never do well in search. If you search a brand + Sale in Google it is always the site/brand page that comes up, never the sale version (This is from research on other similar sites and my own analysis) Same with Sub Cats - eg, Brand + Subcat - it's always site/brand that comes up first wand has the highest PA. Also we can't analyse any of these sale pages in MOZ or anywhere else as they are not in search at all having been no indexed. That's my conundrum for today, Any thoughts would be appreciated!0 -
Structured Data and Google Rich Cards for products
It appears Google is moving towards the Rich Cards JSON-LD for all data. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/05/introducing-rich-cards.html However on an ecommerce site when I have schema.org microdata structured data inline for a product and then I add the JSON-LD structured data Google treats that as two products on the page even though they are the same. To make the matter more confusing Bing doesn't appear to support JSON-LD. I can go back to the inline structured data only, but that would mean when Rich Cards for products eventually come I won't be ready. What do you recommend I do for long term seo, go back to the old or press forward with JSON-LD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Unlimited Product Pages
While browsing through my Moz campaign, I noticed that my site is pulling up unlimited numbers of product pages even though no products appear on them. i.e. http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=16 http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=100 http://www.interstellarstore.com/star-trek-memorabilia?page=200 I have no ideal how to resolve this issue. I can't possible 301 an unlimited number of pages, and I can see this being a big SEO problem. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Handling Multiple Domain 301 Redirects on Single htaccess file
Hello, I have a client that currently that has 9 different markets with different sub-domains on one server (aka one htaccess file.). All the sites have very similar Navigation and some of them contain the same products aka same URLs. The site is using Magento CMS and I'm trying to figure out how to redirect some products that have been removed from one of the stores. The problem I'm running into is when I try to redirect one store url, it redirects all the site's URLs. Example http://store.domain1.com/ http://store.domain2.com/ I'd like to redirect http://store.domain1.com/old-url.html to http://store.domain1.com/new-url.html without making http://store.domain2.com/old-url.html redirect. I've literally been pulling out my hair trying to figure this one out but have had no luck. Does anybody have any ideas on how I could do this without having the sites redirect or create any loops? Any wisdom from you apache experts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Erik
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Erik-M0 -
SEO Priorities for Ecommerce Sites
Hello All! What is the best way to rank SEO tasks by PRIORITY for Ecommerce sites to improve?? It can be quite overwhelming with all the types of projects/tasks needed to improve organic rankings... How would you rank the most CRITICAL tasks to spend the MOST TIME on to the tasks you spend less on. Appreciate your input in advance 🙂 Thank you! Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
Panda/Penguin & Ecommerce Sites in similar niches
Hello, We have a few online stores that are in similar niches. How do we make sure that we don't get penalized for this (Panda/Penguin) We have the sites interlinked, but our newest one is not going to be linked to the others. Also, will rewriting descriptions help if the product is on more than one site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Need advice re: selecting an Ecommerce platform
Hi. I am responsible for choosing an ecommerce platform and overseeing the implementation of a large ecommerce site. The site will have tens of thousands of products and will be fairly complex. Eventually the site will integrate with the suppliers back end inventory/order management system, which is some sort of custom Windows/.NET system. (I'm not very technical if you haven't noticed....) Primarily I want a platform that is SEO friendly, and I have to be sure that the site is developed properly from an SEO and usability perspective. I thought I would go with an asp.net solution (aspdotnetstorefront, specifically) to facilitate the future integration, but I am questioning this choice after reading some of the comments I have found here at SEOMoz. So is asp.net really a bad choice SEO-wise? I almost considered Magento, but was having trouble finding a good solution provider to work with. I also worried about integration issues down the road. I would appreciate any advice or input anyone may have. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbg7810 -
Whats the best way to handle product microformats such as hproduct, goodrelations on ecommerce for Google?
With web3.0 results with microfrmatting showing in google, yahoo etc through reviews, instock, events, sales, pricing etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RampUpInteractive0