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
-
Discontinued products on ecommerce store
Hi, I have a high number of very-low/zero traffic and zero backlinked product pages that have been discontinued (and wont come back). For these pages we automatically remove them from our website indexes and also removed internal links and then essentially kept the product pages and their urls intact but just added a note saying "no longer available, how about these..." with alternate similar product options. This seems to be the general consensus online for discontinued product pages that have little value. The questions is do I either 404 or noindex these now discontinued pages? What are the pros or cons? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coma990 -
Similar product descriptions but with different urls
I had this question before and was not fully satisfied with the answer.. We are selling adhesives and some of the products have the same name and description, the only thing that separates them are the width on the roll.. Are old/online setup are as following, each product has its own product page with more or less the same description. For example here http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2-100/ and here http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2-150/ The above product pages are for a product called Fentrim 2. its availiable in widhts from 75 to 300mm.. so, its six diffent products pages with more or less the same description. The other variations of the products besides the width. are Fentrim 20, Fentrim IS 2 and Fentrim IS 20. So this gives us 6 x Fentrim 20 product pages with the same description, just the width that changes. 6 x Fentrim 2 product pages with the same description, just the width that changes. 6 x Fentrim IS 20 product pages with the same description, just the width that changes. 6 x Fentrim IS 2 product pages with the same description, just the width that changes. I get that this can cause us problems in the terms of duplicate content. The plan that we have now is to have 4 different product pages with variations instead. For each of those for product pages we have well written and unique content. And have the old ones 301 redirected to them. Like this http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2 http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-20 http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-IS-2 http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-IS-20 Today we gain traffic from one product page per variation and it seems that google has picked those ones out randomly, see the attached screenshot.. Will we loose rank? will this increase our position, whats your ideas? // Jonas PG4aAcM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
Product instant answers?
Hi Guys, I noticed today that Google was serving a VERY different organic result for a product level search. The query was "giro aspect". Included is a screenshot of the SERP. Anyone know about these? Is there anything we need to do to get this (i.e certain schema.org markup)? Any insights appreciated,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evoNick
Will fPzGb06.jpg0 -
Magento products and eBay - duplicate content risk?
Hi, We are selling about 1000 sticker products in our online store and would like to expand a large part of our products lineup to eBay as well. There are pretty good modules for this as I've heard. I'm just wondering if there will be duplicate content problems if I sync the products between Magento and eBay and they get uploaded to eBay with identical titles, descriptions and images? What's the workaround in this case? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedbird12290 -
Kill, pimp or cut loose? Ideas for a legacy ECommerce blog
Hi, I'm looking to revamp the fortunes of an ailing Fashion ECommerce blog, which once had an impact on SEO for the site which it linked to but now has fallen by the wayside. Blog sits here: www.mydomain.com/blog and links to products and categories on the ECommerce site www.mydomain.com. The blog has about 2000 posts on it written over the past 5 years, which are almost all rewritten content about existing stories, events or embedded youtube videos related to fashion on the Web. None of the blog topics are unique, but the posts have been rewritten well and in an entertaining way - i.e. it's not just a copy and paste. The blog is written on an old, proprietary platform and only has basic Social sharing. You can't comment on posts, or see "most popular" posts or tag clouds etc. It is optimised for SEO though, with fashion category tags, date archives and friendly URLs. The company badly needs a shot in the arm for its content marketing efforts - so we're looking into the creation of infographics and other types of high quality, sharable content with an outreach effort. Ideally I want this content to be hosted on the Ecommerce site, but am faced with a few options which I'd appreciate the community's view on: How I should handle the mix of the legacy content on /blog and the addition of new, "high quality" content? (Pimp v1) Leave the /blog exactly as is and add the new, high quality content as new posts to it. Invest in pimping the /blog UI so that it has features such as commenting/tag clouds etc. They could migrate the blog to Wordpress, but leave it on the same URL. (Cut loose) Leave the /blog alone, and start afresh with a new Wordpress blog for the new, high quality content. e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com. The old blog posts probably aren't worth bothering about, but it might be risky to delete them as there are a lot and are better off with them than without. (Pimp v2) Set up a new Wordpress blog (e.g. /News or news.mydomain.com) for the new content and move the old /blog content to it. 301 the old /blog posts to the new location. The depth of old content that exists will add weight to the new content from a user's perspective, but will seem sparse if published on its own. Not sure why I would do this, but it's an option... (Kill) Kill the old /blog content, start a new one for the new, high quality content. Maybe there's another option I haven't considered. Thanks in advance, George
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webmethod1 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Our main domain has thousands of subdomains with same content (expired hosting), how should we handle it?
Hello, Our client allows users to create free-trial subdomains and once the trial expires, all the domains have the same page. If people stick, their own websites are hosted on the subdomain. Since all these expired trials subdomains have the same content and are linking towards the Homepage, should they be nofollows? Has anyone dealt with something similar? Thanks very much in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCAILLE0 -
Production and Priority Issue for SEO and Website Usability
I am a NOVICE .........My website is about 4 months old. My developer/programmer only has 4-6 hours of work a week so it is going to take 4 months to finish two weeks of work. So I have to prioritize the things that are best for SEO (Our architecture is PHP,Apache and Zend) .** If you are interested I would be curious to how you would prioritize some or all of these. Or at least as many as you can until you get bored.** 1. Optimizing Cart/Conversion - 7 hrs - (Extremely low conversion rates)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux
2. Optimizing Speed for usability -10+ hrs (Very slow on initial load time) 10-14 sec
3. Filling in all Titles and Metadata - 2 hrs
4. Contact persistence with cookie...enter data only once. - 2 hrs
5. Social panels for sharing content - 3 hrs
6. Custom notifications for those who opt in. for updates - 5 hrs
7. Shorten 12 key URL's and optimize with key words - 3 hrs (I rank this very high)
8. Install Wordpress Blog - 5-10 hrs
9. RSS Feed - 5 hrs ( Run a feed real time on side of page)
10. Create Content Management System for me - 20 hrs (So I can make changes)
11. Keywords for H-1 Tags - 1 hr
12. At tag for images - 1 hr
13. Use of bold /italics - 2 hrs
14. Canonical tag in head - 3 hrs Any expert advice will be greatly appreciated. Boodreaux PS After studying SEO for 1 month I think the priorities should be #7,#3, #2, #1, #5 (on landing pages) #11, #12,#6, #4, #13, #14, #8, #9, #100