Thanks Mike. It certainly sounds like moving all SKUs onto 1 page is preferable. I suspect that I may need to spend a bit of dosh getting the website's on-page structure amended if going down this approach.

With regards to point 1,  I assume the pages will still be crawled but any link equity would be passed to the canonicalised version of the page?

Thanks for the advice guys.

What do you think of Takeshi's advice below regarding adding canonical link to product page that points to a product category page

I.e. we have 20 of the same jumpers of different sizes, colours. A canonical tag is added to the product page that points to a parent page for the jumper, rather than the specific product page.

Thanks Takeshi - this approach sounds like something I can implement sooner rather than later.

Have you had success using it?

Thanks Mike - this certainly makes sense.

My product pages do not currently change the URL parameters depending ont he product sku the visitor changes , but the approach you've taken sounds perfect for your setup

Hi guys

Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now.

I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products.

A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase).

Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc.

Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content.

Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue.

If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!

Thanks Istvan.

I've just spoken to Google help via their online Adwords Chat function (good tip there!) and they have provided me with information about setting up your products so that the SKUs are displayed depending on the terms the searcher uses:

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#other

For reference, you basically tag your 1 product page up and tell in the data feed within Google Merchant - this will in turn tell Google which variant URL to show to the browser based on things such as size, colour, weight etc. et.c

1 follow up question....do you know how this would work with regards to Google Shopping / Base?

If I followed the approach you have suggested would I be able to add each SKU as an individual item within Google shopping (ie. large red t-shirt,  medium red t-shirt, yellow medium t-shirt etc.) or would I only be able to promote the product page itself (containing all 24 SKUs - for example)?

Ok great - thanks for the great advice!

Thanks Istvan - so what would the customer be looking at when they view the SKU URL?

Is the image & text completely different or would you just change the picture & price (if applicable)...hope my question makes sense!

I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience.

This is where my head starts to hurt!

Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size).

My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this:

a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page.

b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right.

Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page?

I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. .

Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well?

Kind regards

Tom

I guess if you could host all your products at root level then this would be better....it just may be difficult to manage house keeping wise.

To avoid duplicate content I would specify that you don't have the same product page sitting in different categories.

Instead the product page should be the same URL even if it lives in multiple categories.e.g. www.example/product/luxim-FZ200.html

So if you click on the product link in Panasonic you go to the product page. You then go to the same page if you click on the product page from the "digital camera" category. The page is then unique and doesn't live in any category in particular.

You can then set the canonical link at product page level.