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.
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
-
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience.
This is where my head starts to hurt!
Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size).
My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this:
a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page.
b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right.
Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page?
I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. .
Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well?
Kind regards
Tom
-
Ah cool!
I am glad it has worked out. -
Thanks Istvan.
I've just spoken to Google help via their online Adwords Chat function (good tip there!) and they have provided me with information about setting up your products so that the SKUs are displayed depending on the terms the searcher uses:
http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#other
For reference, you basically tag your 1 product page up and tell in the data feed within Google Merchant - this will in turn tell Google which variant URL to show to the browser based on things such as size, colour, weight etc. et.c
-
I am not 100% sure, but I think with this case you could only use the product page itself.
I need to digg into this a littlebit more before giving you an accurate answer.
-
1 follow up question....do you know how this would work with regards to Google Shopping / Base?
If I followed the approach you have suggested would I be able to add each SKU as an individual item within Google shopping (ie. large red t-shirt, medium red t-shirt, yellow medium t-shirt etc.) or would I only be able to promote the product page itself (containing all 24 SKUs - for example)?
-
Ok great - thanks for the great advice!
-
Hi Tom,
I would only change the picture and the price (if applicable). The text could also change is some proportion (for example the size description, color description, etc).
Gr.,
Istvan
-
Thanks Istvan - so what would the customer be looking at when they view the SKU URL?
Is the image & text completely different or would you just change the picture & price (if applicable)...hope my question makes sense!
-
Hi Tom,
What I would do is that I would use the same url and different parameter for the SKU-s.
I will point out an example:
www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html?sku=skunumber
on the product page you would have a canonical link to: www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html
I hope that helped,
Istvan
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
-
Reviews on Product Page or Separated
Good Afternoon We currently have our individual product information pages set-up with a link through to a separate review page optimised for the term "Product A Reviews" I was reading about structured data and if I read correctly, the reviews should sit with the marked up product data so I was wondering whether to merge them back into one page. We have many reviews so the review pages are paginated in blocks of 25 My options are: Leave as it is, product info page and separate review page Merge the review content back in to the main page and have the pagination work on that page Include the first 25 reviews on the product info page then when user clicks through to page 2, 3 etc they're taken to the separated review page. In that way the product page would regularly get new content and we can still have a page specifically targeted for reviews. From the users point of view, they probably aren't even aware they're being taken to a separate reviews page so with that in mind as I'm typing this maybe they should be one page again
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Unique page for each product variant? (Not eCommerce)
Hi Mozzers, Just looking for a little advice before I launch into a huge workload. We have landing pages for vehicle manufacturers. We then have anchor links in that page for each vehicle model that manufacturer has, with further info on the model further down the page. So we're toying with the idea of launching a unique page for each of the models rather than having them all on the same landing page. This will take an age and a minute but if it is worth it, we want to do it. Do you guys see a benefit to having unique pages for each model? Do you think it would attract more natural links? Would this help or hinder the manufacturer landing page in general? Should the manufacturer landing page be noindex so as to avoid duplicate content issues? I can see a lot of work and risk, just looking for a few opinions. PM for more info. Thanks a lot people, Jamie
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Product meta tags are not updating in my Magneto website!
I need some help! For some reason, each time I update the product meta tags in my Magento website, it doesn't change on the current website? Could someone help me understand why that is?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Blog Ranking NOT home page main website?!
Hi, Our Blog (http://blog.thailand-investigation.com) is ranking for some of our major keywords but not our home page (http://www.thailand-investigation.com)!? Our blog is WordPress and our main website is HTML. It seems like the search engines consider that they are 2 separate websites!? When I check the incoming links to our website, I get also the blog links!!!??? Is it normal? Do I have to build a relation of some kind or write some code saying that it is our Blog... I don't know! I'm not a SEO specialist or even a webmaster. I'm a small business owner and take care on my website. I created by myself but never learned! So, please help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | MichelMauquoi0 -
Thoughts about stub pages - 200 & noindex ok, or 404?
With large database/template driven websites it is often possible to get a lot of pages with no content on them. What are the current thoughts regarding these pages with no content, options; Return a 200 header code with noindex meta tag Return a 404 page & header code Something else? Thanks
Technical SEO | | slingshot0 -
Google counting numbers of products on category pages - what about pagination ?
Hi there, Whilst checking out the SERPS, as you do, I noticed that where our category page appears, google now seems to be counting the number of products (what it calls items) on the product page and displaying this in the 1st part of the description (see image attached). My problem is we employ pagination, so that our category page will have 15 items on it, then there are paginated results for the rest, with either ?page=2 or page-2/ etc. appended to the URL. Although this is only a minor issue, I was just wondering if there was a way to change the number of products displayed on that page to be the entire number of products in that category, is there a microformat markup or something that can over-ride what google has detected ? Furthermore is this system of pagination effective ? I have considered using javascript pagination, such that all products would be loaded on to the one page but hidden until 'paginated', but I was worried about having hidden elements on the page, and also the impact of load times. Although I think this may solve the problem and display the true number of products in a section! Any help much appreciated, Stuart b4urme.jpg
Technical SEO | | stukerr0 -
Nofollow and ecommerce cart/checkout pages
Hi!! Another noob question: Should I be nofollowing my site's cart and checkout pages? Or as SEs can't get to the checkout pages without either logging in or completing the form is it something I shouldn't worry about? Have read things saying both. Not sure which is correct. Thank you! Appreciate the help. Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0