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What is the best way to handle Product URLs which prepopulate options?

Technical SEO

297

moturner last edited by

We are currently building a new site which has the ability to pre-populate product options based on parameters in the URL. We have done this so that we can send individual product URLs to google shopping.

I don't want to create lots of duplicate pages so I was wondering what you thought was the best way to handle this?

My current thoughts are:

1. Sessions and Parameters
On-site product page filters populate using sessions so no parameters are required on-site but options can still be pre-populated via parameters (product?colour=blue&size=100cm) if the user reaches the site via google shopping. We could also add "noindex, follow" to the pages with parameters and a canonical tag to the page without parameters.

2. Text base Parameters
Make the parameters in to text based URLs (product/blue/100cm/) and still use "noindex, follow" meta tag and add a canonical tag to the page without parameters. I believe this is possibly the best solution as it still allows users to link to and share pre-populated pages but they won't get indexed and the link juice would still pass to the main product page.

3. Standard Parmaters
After thinking more today I am considering the best way may be the simplest. Simply using standard parameters (product?colour=blue&size=100cm) so that I can then tell google what they do in webmaster tools and also add "noindex, follow" to the pages with parameters along with the canonical tag to the page without parameters.

What do you think the best way to handle this would be?
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