Multiple Sizes of eCommerce Product Best Practice
-
I sell a product that comes in 9 different sizes, two materials, and two different shapes. People often search for this product by size, material and shape as follows:
#9 material1 square widget
#5 material2 circle widget
The dilemma I'm facing is should I create 1 page for each of these products resulting in 36 different pages, or should I create one page that the users can select size shape and material?
I'm thinking that from a usability stance, the 36 different pages are easier to navigate and determine price on, but I'm afraid that going the route that is easier for the customer to use in this case could hurt me duplicate content wise. I'm all about making a good user experience, but don't want to hurt myself because the content on all 9 sizes is basically the same.
Are images of the product enough to be considered non-duplicate content? I also list out the dimensions of each product, but beyond that there isn't much to delineate the content.
My plan is to create one page with all the content that relates to all of the products as a top level page with links to the individual products broken down, but just wanted to get some feedback from you guys before making the effort.
-
You have two different materials and two different shapes. Each of those materials should have different characteristics and each of those shapes should have different characteristics.
If I owned this site I might create four pages....
Round Wooden Widgets - Size 1 to 9
Square Wooden Widgets - Size 1 to 9
Round Brass Widgets - Size 1 to 9
Square Brass Widgets - Size 1 to 9
Each of these pages would have substantive content. For example: why brass round widgets are the best for certain people, the best for certain uses and how they compare with the wooden and the square. These four pages would have very substantive informative content and offer the featured widgets for sale. Maybe I would have informative content in the right column and images with purchase buttons in the left.
I would attack with pages that are: informative, unique, substantive, well illustrated and transactional. Do this well and I think you will kick some ass.
If you put the most popular sizes in the title tag that will give them nearly as much relevance as separate pages and the substantive content will compete well against sellers who have one size on skimpy content pages.
Defeat your competitors' content and get your keywords into kickass title tags.
-
I own a site in the custom t-shirt space. We deal with a similar issue to what you are talking about. Each product comes in lots of different sizes. To make matters worse we have several products that are nearly identical with just minor difference being the manufacturer of the goods. For example hanes, fruit of the loom, gildan all sell a main t-shirt that is pretty much identical with the exception of the tag. We have always had the sizing information on 1 product page.
I believe you are going to want to focus on 1 page with all the shapes and materials. I clearly don't know our business but I think I disagree with your assessment about the usability. I believe it will be more familiar to users as well as easier to manage. We have had a lot of results filtered out by panda updates because our "commodity" shirts described above are not unique enough. If you create 36 different pages I think you will be fighting duplicate content for a long time.
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
-
Best site structure for us?
Hey guys, I have a somewhat silly question that I probably know the answer to - but would still like to hear your POV's. We're a WP theme making company but we also build other stuff. Context: 1. All demos for themes currently go under domain.com/Theme_A/ The demo is lorem ipsum so is marked noindex nofollow. That being said we get rocking analytics data usually (not sure if it's still valuable for G after the noindex). 2. Currently we need landing pages for themes and we're running them under domain.com/Theme_A/optimized-landing-page-title.php dofollow and indexed ofc. My question is...Would we be better off to include all landing pages under a domain.com/wordpress-themes/ category/tax and then go for the optimized-landing-page-title.php page? Does it make any difference either or? Right now we're not REALLY running them on subdomains (though the structure seems like it), they're just folders. We're thinking that more seo juice would flow through the different pages if we have them all under the same category, rather than basically starting from scratch each time under a new folder. Right? Thanks!!!
On-Page Optimization | | andy.bigbangthemes1 -
Rich snippets for multiple breadcrumbs
Hey there,
On-Page Optimization | | Supertramp
I have been playing around with rich snippets for multiple breadcrumbs for quite a bit now - without any success. It would be great if someone could point me to an example where this has been implemented correctly. I followed the Google recommendation but it doesn't seem to work for me. See also: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2335753/Matt-Cutts-If-You-Have-Multiple-Breadcrumbs-Google-Picks-the-First-One Thanks for your help. Cheers,
Jochen0 -
How to Manage Comparison products website
Hi Mozzers I have been Working on a Comparison Website ; Where We are comparing Single products to many other Products with same specs. E.G : Product A vs Product B and Product A vs Product C ? How We can manage it So that WE donot have duplicate Content issues. Remember: Products are digital so cannot change much Content in there.
On-Page Optimization | | Asjad0 -
Collaps-O-Matic for product video transcripts - bad for SEO?
I'm using Wordpress plugin Collapse-O-Matic as a collapse/reveal function for my product video transcripts. Is this ok from an SEO standpoint? Will Google and other search engines see it as hidden content? Are there better options?
On-Page Optimization | | Livet0 -
Is is ok to have multiple H2 or H3s?
Hi mozzers, I am wondering if the search engine gets bothered to read multiple heading 2s or heading 3s or heading4s (these would be unique content headings of course)? I am asking this because I need to follow a consistent content structure and many of titles would fall into one type of headings. Thanks Ty
On-Page Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art7 -
ECommerce URL's
This is based on a clothing retailer, eCommerce site. In an effort to reduce the length of our product names, we are considering removing terms like long-sleeve, short-sleeve, etc., but leaving that information in the URL. Now, the concern is that we would lose some traction in the SERP's if those descriptive words are left out as the product name is also our page title. Then I think keywords as broad as long-sleeve shirt wouldn't serve us well anyways. One idea we have is that the alt tag on the product image could still display the longer product name that would include long-sleeve, etc. thus having the keyword on the product page. Any ideas or suggestions? Hope this is clear. Seems redundant from a user standpoint to state long-sleeve, etc. in every product name. Thanks - your answers are always so helpful!
On-Page Optimization | | kennyrowe0 -
Anchor text in Ecommerce site without relevant pages
I'm posting articles to my e-commerce site and just wondering about the anchor text links within the posts. I don't have relevant static pages but the items do come up in a search query. For example i don't have a specific page for red wine but if a user searched for red wine it would give a search query URL. Should I use that search URL query as my anchor text?
On-Page Optimization | | acs1110 -
Alt tag matching product titles - e-commerce
Hey all, Just wondering if it is ok to match the alt tag to product titles. Imagine an e-commerce site that lists a whole lot of products on any one page for any one category. Each product listing has a thumbnail image beside it. The easiest way to implement this dynamically is to use the product title for the alt tag. Anyone had any experience with this? Is it overkill / spam of keywords - given that the product title is repeated. Our current situation is that our alt tags are simply blank or say 'photo' which is no good, and we have hundreds of thousands of pages. Cheers, Croozie
On-Page Optimization | | sichristie0