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.
[e-commerce] Should I index product variants?
-
Hi guys,
I have e-commerce site, that sells car tires. I was wondering would I benefit from making all Product Variants ( for example each tire size ) as different page, that has link to the main product to provide some affiliation, or should I make each variant noindex, and add rel=canonical to the main product.
The benefits from having each variant indexed can be many:
-
greater click through rate
-
more relative results for customers
-
etc.
But I'm not sure how to handle the duplicate content issue ( in this case, only the title, URL and H1 can be different ).
Regards.
-
-
I agree with Mat on this one. Also, building links to one page and making it stronger can lead to it ranking well for those same long-tail terms that are only in the on-page copy instead of in the page titles.
Also, I think the one page approach is a better experience for the users.
-
Unless you can genuinely and legitimately justify unique content for each I would either canonical them from the start or better still get them on one page.
I know it sounds like an easy long-tail win, but it can go horribly wrong. I'm currently working on a site that is being heavily penalised as a result of a similar approach and we're having a nightmare getting the thin content out of the index.
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
-
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
How to add Canonical Tags on Opencart Products
Does anyone know how to add canonical tags to product pages in Opencart? Is this possible to do in htaccess? If so, how specifically should it be written in? Please do not post any links to other pages which reference generic canonical information as I've read them all and none help. I'm looking for an Opencart specific answer, or a way to do it in htaccess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Lazy Loading of products on an E-Commerce Website - Options Needed
Hi Moz Fans. We are in the process of re-designing our product pages and we need to improve the page load speed. Our developers have suggested that we load the associated products on the page using Lazy Loading, While I understand this will certainly have a positive impact on the page load speed I am concerned on the SEO impact. We can have upwards of 50 associated products on a page so need a solution. So far I have found the following solution online which uses Lazy Loading and Escaped Fragments - The concern here is from serving an alternate version to search engines. The solution was developed by Google not only for lazy loading, but for indexing AJAX contents in general.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBGlobalSEO
Here's the official page: Making AJAX Applications Crawlable. The documentation is simple and clear, but in a few words the solution is to use slightly modified URL fragments.
A fragment is the last part of the URL, prefixed by #. Fragments are not propagated to the server, they are used only on the client side to tell the browser to show something, usually to move to a in-page bookmark.
If instead of using # as the prefix, you use #!, this instructs Google to ask the server for a special version of your page using an ugly URL. When the server receives this ugly request, it's your responsibility to send back a static version of the page that renders an HTML snapshot (the not indexed image in our case). It seems complicated but it is not, let's use our gallery as an example. Every gallery thumbnail has to have an hyperlink like: http://www.idea-r.it/...#!blogimage=<image-number></image-number> When the crawler will find this markup will change it to
http://www.idea-r.it/...?_escaped_fragment_=blogimage=<image-number></image-number> Let's take a look at what you have to answer on the server side to provide a valid HTML snapshot.
My implementation uses ASP.NET, but any server technology will be good. var fragment = Request.QueryString[``"_escaped_fragment_"``];``if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(fragment))``{``var escapedParams = fragment.Split(``new``[] { ``'=' });``if (escapedParams.Length == 2)``{``var imageToDisplay = escapedParams[1];``// Render the page with the gallery showing ``// the requested image (statically!)``...``}``} What's rendered is an HTML snapshot, that is a static version of the gallery already positioned on the requested image (server side).
To make it perfect we have to give the user a chance to bookmark the current gallery image.
90% comes for free, we have only to parse the fragment on the client side and show the requested image if (window.location.hash)``{``// NOTE: remove initial #``var fragmentParams = window.location.hash.substring(1).split(``'='``);``var imageToDisplay = fragmentParams[1]``// Render the page with the gallery showing the requested image (dynamically!)``...``} The other option would be to look at a recommendation engine to show a small selection of related products instead. This would cut the total number of related products down. The concern with this one is we are removing a massive chunk of content from he existing pages, Some is not the most relevant but its content. Any advice and discussion welcome 🙂0 -
Multiple Ecommerce sites, same products
We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
De-indexing product "quick view" pages
Hi there, The e-commerce website I am working on seems to index all of the "quick view" pages (which normally occur as iframes on the category page) as their own unique pages, creating thousands of duplicate pages / overly-dynamic URLs. Each indexed "quick view" page has the following URL structure: www.mydomain.com/catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodId=89514&catgId=cat140142&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=475&width=700 where the only thing that changes is the product ID and category number. Would using "disallow" in Robots.txt be the best way to de-indexing all of these URLs? If so, could someone help me identify how to best structure this disallow statement? Would it be: Disallow: /catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodID=* Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Should I Allow Blog Tag Pages to be Indexed?
I have a wordpress blog with settings currently set so that Google does not index tag pages. Is this a best practice that avoids duplicate content or am I hurting the site by taking eligible pages out of the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0 -
Should you stop indexing of short lived pages?
In my site there will be a lot of pages that have a short life span of about a week as they are items on sale, should I nofollow the links meaning the site has a fwe hundred pages or allow indexing and have thousands but then have lots of links to pages that do not exist. I would of course if allowing indexing make sure the page links does not error and sends them to a similarly relevant page but which is best for me with the SEarch Engines? I would like to have the option of loads of links with pages of loads of content but not if it is detrimental Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | barney30120
