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.
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
-
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience.
This is where my head starts to hurt!
Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size).
My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this:
a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page.
b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right.
Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page?
I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. .
Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well?
Kind regards
Tom
-
Ah cool!
I am glad it has worked out.
-
Thanks Istvan.
I've just spoken to Google help via their online Adwords Chat function (good tip there!) and they have provided me with information about setting up your products so that the SKUs are displayed depending on the terms the searcher uses:
http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#other
For reference, you basically tag your 1 product page up and tell in the data feed within Google Merchant - this will in turn tell Google which variant URL to show to the browser based on things such as size, colour, weight etc. et.c
-
I am not 100% sure, but I think with this case you could only use the product page itself.
I need to digg into this a littlebit more before giving you an accurate answer.
-
1 follow up question....do you know how this would work with regards to Google Shopping / Base?
If I followed the approach you have suggested would I be able to add each SKU as an individual item within Google shopping (ie. large red t-shirt, medium red t-shirt, yellow medium t-shirt etc.) or would I only be able to promote the product page itself (containing all 24 SKUs - for example)?
-
Ok great - thanks for the great advice!
-
Hi Tom,
I would only change the picture and the price (if applicable). The text could also change is some proportion (for example the size description, color description, etc).
Gr.,
Istvan
-
Thanks Istvan - so what would the customer be looking at when they view the SKU URL?
Is the image & text completely different or would you just change the picture & price (if applicable)...hope my question makes sense!
-
Hi Tom,
What I would do is that I would use the same url and different parameter for the SKU-s.
I will point out an example:
www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html?sku=skunumber
on the product page you would have a canonical link to: www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html
I hope that helped,
Istvan
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
-
Product schema GSC Error 'offers, review, or aggregateRating should be specified'
I do not have a sku, global identifier, rating or offer for my product. Nonetheless it is my product. The price is variable (as it's insurance) so it would be inappropriate to provide a high or low price. Therefore, these items were not included in my product schema. SD Testing tool showed 2 warnings, for missing sku and global identifier. Google Search Console gave me an error today that said: 'offers, review, or aggregateRating should be specified' I don't want to be dishonest in supplying any of these, but I also don't want to have my page deprecated in the search results. BUT I DO want my item to show up as a product. Should I forget the product schema? Advice/suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
What's the best way to test Angular JS heavy page for SEO?
Hi Moz community, Our tech team has recently decided to try switching our product pages to be JavaScript dependent, this includes links, product descriptions and things like breadcrumbs in JS. Given my concerns, they will create a proof of concept with a few product pages in a QA environment so I can test the SEO implications of these changes. They are planning to use Angular 5 client side rendering without any prerendering. I suggested universal but they said the lift was too great, so we're testing to see if this works. I've read a lot of the articles in this guide to all things SEO and JS and am fairly confident in understanding when a site uses JS and how to troubleshoot to make sure everything is getting crawled and indexed. https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/javascript-seo-resources/ However, I am not sure I'll be able to test the QA pages since they aren't indexable and lives behind a login. I will be able to crawl the page using Screaming Frog but that's generally regarded as what a crawler should be able to crawl and not really what Googlebot will actually be able to crawl and index. Any thoughts on this, is this concern valid? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Reviews on Product Page or Separated
Good Afternoon We currently have our individual product information pages set-up with a link through to a separate review page optimised for the term "Product A Reviews" I was reading about structured data and if I read correctly, the reviews should sit with the marked up product data so I was wondering whether to merge them back into one page. We have many reviews so the review pages are paginated in blocks of 25 My options are: Leave as it is, product info page and separate review page Merge the review content back in to the main page and have the pagination work on that page Include the first 25 reviews on the product info page then when user clicks through to page 2, 3 etc they're taken to the separated review page. In that way the product page would regularly get new content and we can still have a page specifically targeted for reviews. From the users point of view, they probably aren't even aware they're being taken to a separate reviews page so with that in mind as I'm typing this maybe they should be one page again
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail
Hi, I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
Technical SEO | | amastone
I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category.
Is this a right use of the canonical?
Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bits If I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages. thanks marco0 -
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
Unique page for each product variant? (Not eCommerce)
Hi Mozzers, Just looking for a little advice before I launch into a huge workload. We have landing pages for vehicle manufacturers. We then have anchor links in that page for each vehicle model that manufacturer has, with further info on the model further down the page. So we're toying with the idea of launching a unique page for each of the models rather than having them all on the same landing page. This will take an age and a minute but if it is worth it, we want to do it. Do you guys see a benefit to having unique pages for each model? Do you think it would attract more natural links? Would this help or hinder the manufacturer landing page in general? Should the manufacturer landing page be noindex so as to avoid duplicate content issues? I can see a lot of work and risk, just looking for a few opinions. PM for more info. Thanks a lot people, Jamie
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
Does 'framing' a website create duplicate content?
Something I have not come across before, but hope others here are able offer advice based on experience: A client has independently created a series of mini-sites, aimed at targeting specific locations. The tactic has worked very well and they have achieved a large amount of well targeted traffic as a result. Each mini-site is different but then in the nav, if you want to view prices or go to the booking page, that then links to what at first appears to be their main site. However, you then notice that the URL is actually situated on the mini-site. What they have done is 'framed' the main site so that it appears exactly the same even when navigating through this exact replica site. Checking the code, there is almost nothing there - in fact there is actually no content at all. Below the head, there is a piece of code: <frameset rows="*" framespacing=0 frameborder=0> <frame src="[http://www.example.com](view-source:http://www.yellowskips.com/)" frameborder=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0> <noframes>Your browser does not support frames. Click [here](http://www.example.com) to view.noframes> frameset> Given that main site content does not appear to show in the source code, do we have an issue with duplicate content? This issue is that these 'referrals' are showing in Analytics, despite the fact that the code does not appear in the source, which is slightly confusing for me. They have done this without consultation and I'm very concerned that this could potentially be creating duplicate content of their ENTIRE main site on dozens of mini-sites. I should also add that there are no links to the mini-sites from the main site, so if you guys advise that this is creating duplicate content, I would not be worried about creating a link-wheel if I advise them to link directly to the main site rather than the framed pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0