Handling of product variations and colours in ecommerce
-
Hi,
our site prams.net has 72.000 crawled and only 2500 indexed urls according to deep crawl mainly due to colour variations (each colour has its own urls now). We now created 1 page per product, eg
http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini
and noindexed all the other ones, which had a positive effect on our seo.
http://www.prams.net/catalogsearch/result/?q=002.030.059.0
I might still hurt our crawl budget a lot that we have so many noindexed pages. The idea is now to redirect 301 all the colour pages to this main page and make them invisible. So google do not have to crawl them anymore, we included the variations in the product pages, so they should still be searchable for google and the user.
Does this make sense or is there a better solution out there? Does anyone have an idea if this will likely have a big or a small impact?
Thanks in advance.
Dieter
-
Whenever you have products that are similar (but only different in color variations or size variations), you should use the canonical tag to specify this. Keep these URLs indexed, but generally speaking the canonical tag is there to help in these situations.
There are literally thousands (or hundreds of thousands?) of sites using the canonical tag successfully.
-
Oleg,
thanks, do you have an example of somebody, who did this?
Thanks in advance
Dieter
-
Yes, that would do good. Since content is identical for each of these products, there should only be 1 URL with all of the variations of that product in order to consolidate all of the authority. If you want to keep all of the variations in search, look into creating anchor links that point to the same "master" url. e.g. http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini-buggy-lightweight-union-jack-b can be linked as http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini#union-jack
That way, the URL is the structure is more SEO friendly but aesthetically the site is identical.
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
-
Law Firm Website Completely Switching Marketing Focus - How to Best Handle
Hi Moz Community, Thanks in advance for the help! We have a law firm client interested in fully switching their SEO marketing from Criminal Defense to Personal Injury. Our client no longer wants any business for Criminal Defense cases. Background Info: The website for the last 10 years has focused on Criminal Defense (and ranks well). Over the last couple of years we have introduced Personal Injury content on the website and achieved some decent rankings as well. In order to make the website less relevant for Criminal Defense, it had crossed our minds to de-index these specific Criminal Defense pages but still leave them present on the website. Question: Would you recommend de-indexing all of the pages at once or done in a gradual manner? Our concern it that doing it all at once could affect the overall domain's authority more sharply and harm rankings for any other keywords not involving Criminal Defense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd1 -
How do you handle a site with inherited negative links, but no penalty?
I'm trying to rank a new client for various key phrases that contain "it support." The problem is that about 100 of their 180 total referring domains have links that include "it support" (usually as partial match, or if exact then for uninteresting terms with low traffic), mostly on quite low quality directories. So, no penalty, and not much exact match I'm worried about, but I'm concerned that there's too high a percentage overall of partial match or simpy "it support"-based links for me to continue building keyword-optimized links to try and rank for the much harder terms we need to rank for... Despite the large number of low quality directories, a disavowal does not seem like a good idea since there is no penalty, but how does one avoid being handicapped by such bad links that came before one's time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Ecommerce question - Should I use a CDN for my images. ?
Hi , We are currently in the process of re-developing out commerce website and I wondering should we use a CDN (content delivery nertwork) for our product images. My category pages are currently showing approx 21 product images per page and the page speed is okay but can be better but the page size is rather large ... anything between 600kb - 1 Meg. We do optimise the images already in photoshop. We also do things like minify etc to get the pages to load as fast as possible but I think the only thing left is using a CDN but I have heard mixed reports about using this.? We are also doing a mobile responsive version of the site to but I know that speed will be king with google and how it reflects on rankings. Whilst I can see a CDN will improve image page load speed etc, I guess there a negative SEO impact as well as images will be stored in the cloud ?.. as opposed on to on my site/database. Does anyone know how best to implement a CDN without impacting on SEO or know of any good SEO /implementation articles on this ?... Maybe do Ieave some images on my category pages so I can still do the alt image tags etc/ and have the remaining images on the CDN.? Many Thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
To list or not to list? Products that contain basic info only, yet show off product depth...
Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description... each item/category is it's own unique web page with basic info like Brand, Model, What it is, Price, & Quantity in stock. For searchers knowing what they want, they can quickly find us via the basic info & see that we have it in stock. But for someone surfing our site, it's not all that attractive or informative as you are scrolling down the category list. Collecting the picture & info can be a slow and time consuming process, but something we'd love to be all caught up on one day. Would it be wiser to take these pages off, or keep them on until they are fully updated with pic & more detail? (My thought is that even though they don't contain a lot of individual detail depth, they still add a substantial quantity of basic related content to the category page that they reside in. This basic info on these items are also given a chance to burn into the web search engines over a longer period of time. As time goes by and their content is improved, they will get re-crawled/re-indexed with their new information depth. Also, even though they don't look all that pretty, it shows off our product depth... if we only listed the items that looked spectacular, then a lot of our categories would only contain a wimpy 3 out of 30 items that we actually have for sale. That feels like a huge misrepresentation of how much selection we actually have to offer. But perhaps this is wrong thinking?) Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
What to do with non-existing products (removed products)?
Hello, I'm selling unique products - only one of a kind of each product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This means that whenever a product is sold, it is removed from display. In order not to upset Google by keep removing indexed pages I created a "sold items" page which links to all of the removed products. The problem is (or maybe it's not a problem) is that I got to the point where I have more "sold items" then existing items (and the list keeps adding up). What should I do with the non-existing items?
Was I correct? ---------------------------------------- ADDED INFO --------- The way the site is built is that I have main category pages and each of them is showing a large amount of products. Most of these products got indexed by Google. Each product has its own unique URL (Products do not return...) Once a product is sold it does not come up in the product categories - I only have a general "sold items" in the footer that shows all of them (with a lot of pagination). Since the products are rapidly changing, i thought it would upset Google to have a hundred 301 redirects in each week or two. Since the products are very similar to one another (only different measurements / colors etc.), I thought of having a link from a sold Item to a similar available item so if Google will direct someone it will probably be to the available product. The problem is that the sold items are now 4 times more than the number of available items... I don't think that a store should display 2008's t-shirts on 2012... Another problem that may rise with so many products is that I'm afraid that the one type of product that is being sold much more often will take charge at the end on the entire site since I will end up with 8,000 sold items of this product, 1000 sold items of other products and 1000 available misc products... this might also start causing duplication problems as the products are quite similar. Should I stop with the "Sold" products and use 301's? Thanks0 -
ECommerce products duplicate content issues - is rel="canonical" the answer?
Howdy, I work on a fairly large eCommerce site, shop.confetti.co.uk. Our CMS doesn't allow us to have 1 product with multiple colour and size options so we created individual product pages for each product variation. This of course means that we have duplicate content issues. The layout of the shop works like this; there is a product group page (here is our disposable camera group) and individual product pages are below. We also use a Google shopping feed. I'm sure we're being penalised as so many of the products on our site are duplicated so, my question is this - is rel="canonical" the best way to stop being penalised and how can I implement it? If not, are there any better suggestions? Also, we have targeted some long-tail keywords in some of the product descriptions so will using rel-canonical effect this or the Google shopping feed? I'd love to hear experiences from people who have been through similar things and what the outcome was in terms of ranking/ROI. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0