Product Colour Variation and Canonicals

[yousayjump]

Hi there,

We are currently doing an SEO audit of an ecommerce website and we ar eunsure on the best practice in terms of using canonical link tag for some product variations.

An example is that the company has a product with two colour variations: Black and Tan. These are for the same product and have 99% the same content. Within the content of the page the colour is the only thing that changes (along with the meta information and imagery of course).

My question is should we choose one product and canonically link back to that one i.e. Black is the main product and we link Tan back to this via a canonical link?

Many thanks in advance.

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi,

Yes, it will be a pain for your writers, but that's what they're paid for. For example, if you had four t-shirts, all different colours, it wouldn't be too difficult to write unique content for each. I wouldn't use the same content and just change the colour, this may cause you problems.

[yousayjump]

Thanks Lewis.

Yes that is what I thought. We don't manage their website in terms of development so this may be out of the question. I will check if the colours are conflicting in any way first. If this fails I think you are correct in that they will need to make the content more unique.

Tricky one isn't it as it is JUST the colour that changes, the products are exactly the same.

Many thanks

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi there,

You need to figure out if colour variations are competing with each other in the SERPs. If not, the best option would be to allow customers to choose a colour via a hover-over or drop-down menu that's built into the page's interface. If you choose this method, the URL will not change and there's no need to canonicalise or worry about duplicate content.

If, however, potential customers are searching for a specific colour of the product via Google, you may want to create separate pages for all variations and write unique content for each. It can be a pain for your writers, but needs must!

I hope this helps.

Lewis