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Thanks for your response! This is how I was leaning as well, but the client is doing the implementation and asked if they needed to update all their URLs, so I wanted to get a second opinion. Maybe this implementation will push them to consolidate

Thanks again!

I am helping a client with SEO for their ecommerce store. They have around 65 products, but close to 500 URLs all for those same products. Basically they have a bit of an index bloat problem but long story short restructuring was too much of a lift for them, so I got them set up with a canonical URL strategy to ensure all duplicate pages point to one "main" product page.

Getting to the point:

They also need an on-page overhaul. I've created keyword optimized titles, metas, H1s, etc. for each product. Do these elements need to be added to every single one of the 450+ product pages OR do I only need to add them to the 65 "main" product pages that everything else is pointing to, since that will ultimately be the page that gets crawled?

I was doing some simple on-page recommendations for a client and realized that they have a bit of a website bloat problem. They are an ecommerce shoe store and for one product, there could be 10+ URLs. For example, this is what ONE product looks like:

example.com/products/shoename-color1

example.com/products/shoename-color2

example.com/collections/style/products/shoename-color1

example.com/collections/style/products/shoename-color2

example.com/collections/adifferentstyle/products/shoename-color1

example.com/collections/adifferentstyle/products/shoename-color2

example.com/collections/shop-latest-styles/products/shoename-color1

example.com/collections/shop-latest-styles/products/shoename-color2

example.com/collections/all/products/shoename-color1

example.com/collections/all/products/shoename-color2

...and so on... all for the same shoe. They have about 20-30 shoes altogether, and some come in 4-5 colors. This has caused some major bloat on their site and I assume some confusion for the search engine. That said, I'm trying to figure out what the best way to tackle this is from an SEO perspective.

Here's where I've gotten to so far:

Is it better to canonicalize all URLs, referencing back to one "main" one, delete all bloat pages re-link everything to the main one(s), or 301 redirect the bloat URLs back to the "main" one(s)?

Or is there another option that I haven't considered?

Thanks!

Thanks for your response! This is how I was leaning as well, but the client is doing the implementation and asked if they needed to update all their URLs, so I wanted to get a second opinion. Maybe this implementation will push them to consolidate

Thanks again!