Too many pages or not enough?

[robertsteck]

I have an SEO question for you: My client is building a new website and wondered about individual pages for his items, let me break it down for you...

He sells display cabinets, one of which is a shot glass cabinet. He has 5 types of the shot glass cabinets, that come in 3 different types of wood, 2 different mirrored backings, and with or without a locking mechanism...

Now is it better, SEO-wise, to create 5 pages for his shot glasses, with the selectable options, or is it better to create a different page for each of his shot glass cabinet options? This would mean something like 24 different shot glass pages.

He feels that the more pages he has, the more lines he's throwing out there looking for a bite, but he, and I, don't know if that is necessarily a good thing for SEO. The pages would be named slightly differently, but the copy on each page would read just about the same...

What do you think? 5 pages with options, or 24 pages again with the ability to change the options.

Side Question: If more pages is the way to go, what would be the draw back when he does this with his other 8 cabinet types and their multitude of configurations?

Thanks for the help!

[LesleyPaone]

Using attributes and combinations is a lot easier and cheaper than not using them. If you create 20 different pages they will all fight each other to rank. You would also need content for 20 different pages as well. Which in itself would be a task if done correctly. I would suggest just having one strong page with good content as opposed to lots of pages with only ok content.

[justin-brock]

These sound like product variations to me. Since the content would vary very little between the versions, I would create a single product page that allows customers to choose the variations they want. A single page allows you to focus more on converting visitors on that page. Plus, you can combine customer reviews and other product information there.

(**Note: **If this product is on Amazon, then definitely make it a single product page with variations. Refer to the webinar by Rick Backus for why.)

Spreading that product content over 5 or 24 pages, with very little to differentiate one page from another, won't really help you in the long run. Google will see it as thin or duplicate content.

I would turn instead to your blog or other sections of the site to create the additional content you need to rank. For example, you could write articles covering:

• All the types of wood we use in our cabinets
• The benefit of xx wood for raw or stained cabinets
• Do you need cabinet locks or not?
• What mirror background fits your room best
• etc.

This approach helps your internal site linking structure promote the money page. Each of those articles could link to the product page where customers see all your variations. Your external linking efforts could be more streamlined as well.