Can Bundling Products Help eCommerce SEO?

[iJeep]

We currently have over 13,000 products on our site.  SeoMoz reports many duplicate pages, which are items that are very similar (different size, application, sku, etc.).  Would it be prudent to create a bundled product that has one page, one description, a set of images and a table with add to cart buttons for all of the different products on that page?  (called a bundled product in Magento).  Then create 301 redirects from all of the individual pages and categories to the relevant new bundled product.

[William.Lau]

Majority of shopping sites I've seen usually have the color tile under the product picture when it is listed with the other products.

If they see that there are other colors, they will most likely click it to see what colors or sizes are available.

This will improve you pageviews and keep the customer on the site, rather then driving them away right away after finding out the size or color is no longer available.

[iJeep]

Yes, that is similar to what I mean.

Would there be an SEO benefit from the new organization?

I'm afraid it might be more difficult for a visitor to find the right part (loosing faceted navigation), because they will have to scroll through a list to find the correct item.

[William.Lau]

Depends what you mean, if its like:

Main product: Bookbag

URL1: Small Bookbag

URL2: Large Bookbag

URL3: Green Bookbag

If these variations are the same product, just different colors and sizes, you should keep them on the same page. Magento can easily bundle those as you mentioned.

And yes, 301 redirect those older links to the bundled URL. It will benefit you overall, it could probably drastically remove a lot of the duplicates.