Should I consolidate products that only vary by color?
-
I've been hired to help improve the SEO for a furniture e commerce site, and in their product listings you'll see several instances where the same product is repeated 5 times, varying only by 'finish'.(Usually Cherry, Mahogany, Maple, etc)
I would think that traditionally, this seems like a no brainer - that you would consolidate these products into variable products. But in the furniture realm, I'm concerned about losing those permalinks for people that might search specifically for 'mahogany desk'.
I'm pretty sure that we will ultimately decide to consolidate into Variable products. I was thinking there could be a sub header tag that said 'Available in: ' and listed the finishes there. But of course I've still lost the color in the url, title tag. I was just wondering if anyone had any advice for me in general. Really appreciate any kind of help. Paul
-
He did, I apologize for not updating this sooner. Thanks for your help EGOL, and Matt. This site is pretty amazing. I think by focusing on google so much, some of the magic as rubbed off. Love the site's design too, as a designer. Anyway, thanks again. Paul
-
Hi Paul!
Did EGOL settle this for you?
-
Thank you for taking the time to share your advice. It was helpful, thank you
-
Most of the time, I list color, finish, size, etc. variants on the same page, but show separate photos with captions that present them.
However, if there is search and buying volume enough for "green widgets" or "brass widgets" or whatever, then I will make a separate page for them. But, when I do that, I am willing to spend enough time to make a unique product description that generously describes and explains and shows, because a substantive page will be needed to avoid duplicate content in search engines.
Separate pages are a good idea if the potential sales can justify the cost and the competition is thick enough that separate pages are needed to become competitive for the different variants of the product.
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
-
How do I keep content-refreshment manageble for large site with facetted product categories?
Dear MOZ'ers,
On-Page Optimization | | Marketing-Omoda
i hope you can help me with the following issue: As a fashion e-commerce site we have a category structure by gender: , brand, product-category and colour. We sell over 250 brands in 50 categories. Off course, we don't sell products in every category for all brands but, in general, we sell 3 or 4 product categories for a brand. Next to this, we also have unique content for brand-product-gender (in fact this is the most common in our site-structure, since fashion is really a gender-based product.) We are planning to leave the site category as it is. we rank well for specific products like 'blue mens sneakers' My question is about copy, or more specific: to keep content-refreshment manageble. At the moment we have a small text at the top of the page and long form content on the bottom (very low below the fold, near the footer, only shown when the product-lister is) Because of seasonality in fashion, category text are regularly updated. As you can imagine, this is quit some work and pretty expensive. So now my question is: on which page level should you advice to have long form content, or distinctive content at all?
On the one hand I'm really sceptical about the value of the text at the bottom, on the other hand I am afraid that, should I decide to remove content from lower hierarchy pages, I might give the wrong signal to search engines: making my site from content rich content modest.0 -
Product Tags
So Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, this are NOT meta tags) which I believe are used for when customers want to search for a product using the search function. So one of my tags could be ''star wars socks'', and when a customer types this into the search it brings up every product containing the tag for socks. This is all good and well, however, these tags appear on the product page itself, right below the Manufacturer/Brand, and above the price. Will Google look kindly on this or could it be considered as keyword stuffing? Or will Google know they're for search and ignore them? I just need to know whether or not removing them entirely will be a good or bad idea.
On-Page Optimization | | moon-boots0 -
Google is showing product rating of 1-star in search results when average rating is 3.7 - 4 stars
When searching for the brand name "SteriPEN", the #3 listing on the SERP is for one of SteriPEN's "Adventurer Opti" product at REI.com, On the SERP for this search, the REI listing for Adventurer Opti product displays showing the product as 1-star based on a product review from 2010. What we don't understand is the fact that the product history has a 3.7 to 4.2 rating on most websites. Why would a product with so many reviews and established history have 1 review that drives the 1-star rating from such a prominent retailer? Makes no sense. Any suggestions as to whom we might be able to contact for help with this is greatly appreciated. edit?usp=sharing
On-Page Optimization | | ReachMaineAgency0 -
How do I manage my organic SEO efforts with multiple product descriptions/specifications???
Good Evening MOZ community I am currently working on a website my company has just launched. I am in charge of the entire commercial side of the business from pricing to brand management including all elements of digital marketing. First of all I should make it clear I am by no means an SEO expert. However I appreciate the importance of organic search and particularly on page optimization and no I need to build it into our site from the onset. My problem lies in that our website stocks roughly 2000 individual products (Tools and Engineering products) and I am struggling to overcome the following; 1. I do not have the time or resource to re-write original product descriptions and specifications for 2000+ products 2. How can I create healthy on page SEO without having to do this? (we are not able to provide budget to outsource these efforts at the moment) Will copying manufacturer descriptions cripple our SEO 3. Many product specifications need to be displayed exactly as they would on the original manufacturer websites. How can I include exact copies of these without being penalized by google for duplicating content? Essentially I realise the importance of on page SEO and want to build it into the site for the future but need to find a way of optimizing it with minimal time. I understand much of this is a big ask but any hints or tips you may have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Rob 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | robmarr7890 -
Will changing order of bullet points in product descriptions add some uniqueness?
We write our own unique product descriptions and have a unique product video for each color variation and multiple unique product images and display seperate user reviews per color variation. We prefer to have seperate product pages for each color variation for several reasons (targeting color searches and user experience seeing all color variations when browsing category pages). Product descriptions of color variations are quite similar.
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse
I was thinking about spinning dynamically order how bullet points of product descriptions are presented to add some more uniqueness. I am not expecting a massive impact, but do you think this increases a bit googles perception of page uniqueness?0 -
Category listing page coming above product pages
A new SEO client we have taken on seem to be hitting most of the points right on with their site and SEO. However one thing that is bugging me is that their category pages i.e. "Footwear" which title tag includes the brands they stock. Is almost always coming up above (if they are ever even found) the product individual pages. Anyone seen this sort of things happening? Very frustrating.
On-Page Optimization | | iboxsecurityltd0 -
Duplicated Products on Homepage and category pages
I have some of my best sellers located on the homepage of my websites. These same products may also appear on the category page as well. On the home page and the category page, the product title, short description, thumbnail, etc. are exact duplicates and I am afraid this is hurting me. I would appreciate any advice you may have on how to deal with this issue. These are some of my best sellers and most often, the homepage will outrank the category page for the product. Thanks in advance, lordhenry
On-Page Optimization | | jake3720 -
product links
If you sell a range of products say 3 at the most, all on their own pages, is it ok to link to the other products within the range from each page? I have tried this and it eventually leads back to the same page is this a good, bad or doesn't really matter thing? Also is the anchor text still important?
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0