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Hi,

Hope someone can help me out here. This is the current situation:

We sell stones/gravel/sand/pebbles etc. for gardens. I will take a type of pebbles and the corresponding pages/URL's to illustrate my question --> black beach pebbles.

• We have a 'top' product page for black beach pebbles on which you can find different types of quantities (differing from 20kg untill 1600 kg).
• There is not any search volume related to the different quantities
• The 'top' page does not link to the pages for the different quantities
• The content on the pages for the different quantities is not exactly the same (different price + slightly different content). But a lot of the content is the same.

Current situation:
- Most pages for the different quantities do not have internal links (about 95%)

• But the sitemap does contain all of these pages.
• Because the sitemap contains all these URL's, google frequently crawls them (I checked the logfiles) and has indexed them.

Problems:

• Google spends its time crawling irrelevant pages --> our entire website is not that big, so these quantity URL's kind of double the total number of URL's.
• Having url's in the sitemap that do not have an internal link is a problem on its own
• All these pages are indexed so all sorts of gravel/pebbles have near duplicates.

My solution:

• remove these URL's from the sitemap --> that will probably stop Google from regularly crawling these pages
• Putting a canonical on the quantity pages pointing to the top-product page. --> that will hopefully remove the irrelevant (no search volume) near duplicates from the index

My questions:

• To be able to see the canonical, google will need to crawl these pages. Will google still do that after removing them from the sitemap?
• Do you agree that these pages are near duplicates and that it is best to remove them from the index?
• A few of these quantity pages do have intenral links (a few procent of them) because of a sale campaign. So there will be some (not much) internal links pointing to non-canonical pages. Would that be a problem?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help!

Best!

Hi all,

We are currently working on implementing structured data to our webshop, for SEO and for google shopping.

We sell stones, pebbles, gravel etc. (to be used in gardens).We offer each product in different sized bags. Customers can buy 20KG minibags, 250KG minibags, 500KG midibags, 1500KG bigbags and bulk quantities (ranging from 3000KG up to 35000KG).

For example, we sell Black Beach Pebbles in the bags as described as above (+ the bulk quantities). We have a product page for these Black Beach Pebbles and on that product page customers can choose the desired bag or desired bulk quantity. For google shopping, visitors land on these productpages. A while back that caused a problem; the landing page contained different prices so sometimes google could not match the prices on the landing page with the prices in our productfeed (because of course, each bag has a different price). So, besides SEO, another reason for us to implement structured data. I have two questions regarding the implementation.

1. For the landing page as described above, the idea now is to mark 1 product with different offers (an offer for each bag + an offer for the bulk quantities). This raises a problem regarding the bulk quantities; the price of the bulk quantity depends on the chosen quantity (customers can pick the desired bulk quantity using a dropdown) on the productpage. How should we markup the price? The idea know is to markup 1 product with different offers for each bag and 1 aggregate offer for the bulk quantities (and using the lowest price, so the price for the smallest bulk quantity). So, for the Black Beach pebbles:

Product = Black beach Pebbles
  Offer (= 20KG minibag)
      Price = ...
  Offer (= 250KG minibag)
      Price = ...
  Offer (= 500KG midibag)
     Price = ...
  Offer (= 1500KG bigbag)
     Price = ...
  AggregateOffer (= Bulk quantities)
     Lowprice = ...

Is combining Offer and AggregateOffer within 1 product the right solution?

2. For the 1500KG Bigbags and bulk quantities we have separate landing pages (because people specifically search for bigbags and bulk quantities). So those landing pages are dedicated to bigbags / bulk quantities. How should we mark up those pages? Should we for example just do this:

On the page for te bigbag:
Product = Black Beach Pebbles 1500KG bigbag
  Offer (=Black Beach Pebbles 1500KG bigbag)
     Price =....

and on the page for the bulk quantities:

Product = Black Beach Pebbles bulk quantities
  AggregateOffer (=Black Beach Pebbles bulk quantities)
     Lowprice=......

Could that cause any confusion for google, because on the productpage with all the available bags, the bigbag is an offer for the product 'Beach Pebbles Black'. And on the second page it is a product on its own.

Thanks in advance!

Best!

First of all, thanks a lot for your reply!

Yes, you're completely correct. Regarding point 3 --> prices are already shown for all bags, but for the bulk quantities, the customer has to choose the desired quantity first.

I will dive into those recources first thing tomorrow! Thanks for providing them!

Hi Arjun,

Thanks for your input, really appreciate it!

Actually, we already have seperate pages for each quantity. So for the Beach Pebbles black example we have:

• The overall product page with all quantities
• A 'simple' productpage for the 20KG bag
• A 'simple' productpage for the 250KG bag
• A 'simple' productpage for the 500KG bag
• A 'simple' productpage for the 1500KG bag
• A 'simple productpage for the bulk quantities

But, these pages are all near duplicates (only difference is the price). Plus, we have a lot of those pages. We noticed that google didn't even index all of them (i guess because they are all near duplicates). Plus, people really aren't searching for those quantities (i.e. googling those quantities), with an exception for the bigbags and bulk quantities. So we really didn't want google to spend it's time crawling all those pages, and because those are kind of thin-content pages we decided to first noindex them so google would take them out of the index. And after they disappeared we made sure there were no internal links pointing to them anymore so google wasn't going to crawl them anymore (we are keeping an eye on the logfiles to be sure google doesn't still crawl them with the same frequency. Would that be the case we will probably just block them through robots.txt).

But, long story short, for SEO we don't really want to use these 'simple' quantity pages (except for the bigbag + bulk quantities --> we gave them all unique and qualitative content). Also, for google shopping we don't want to send visitors to one specific quantity. I think it's kind of the same when someone is clicking (in google shopping) on a certain shoe and you present them with just 1 size.

I'm curious to your thoughts about this! And again: really appreciate your input!