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
-
E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed
Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,0 -
Mass Removal Request from Google Index
Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website. When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts. This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012. So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove. Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404? I believe this is very wrong. As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?0 -
Removing UpperCase URLs from Indexing
This search - site:www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix gives me this result from Google: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. and Google tells me there is another one, which is 'very simliar'. When I click to see it I get: Automotix online coupons and shopping - Qjamba
https://www.qjamba.com/online-savings/Automotix
Online Coupons and Shopping Savings for Automotix. Coupon codes for online discounts on Vehicles & Parts products. This is because I recently changed my program to redirect all urls with uppercase in them to lower case, as it appears that all lowercase is strongly recommended. I assume that having 2 indexed urls for the same content dilutes link juice. Can I safely remove all of my UpperCase indexed pages from Google without it affecting the indexing of the lower case urls? And if, so what is the best way -- there are thousands.0 -
Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
Which cms is good for health product website (selling).?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
How is Google crawling and indexing this directory listing?
We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why. If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site? Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content. For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems. Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result? For example: Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed? Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0
