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Thanks for your response Don. I have a followup question for you.

I did understand your your t-shirt example but I think it's even more refined in our case. Since there are so many different variants, we do have to count them as different products, and we would like to avoid creating custom content right away (there's just so much we would have to create). I'm still thinking our perfect solution would be custom links but with a canonical tag pointing back to "www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001".

Here's my solution based on your advise:

I'm going to keep my main page where people can sort to find there make, model, and year (www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001).

Then I plan to have specific product pages per make, model, and year which will have duplicate content except for the make, model, and year searched and replaced. ie Jeep Wrangler 2015-2016 will be "www.cargoliner/products/jeep-wrangler-2015-2016" and in that page I will have a canonical tag point back to "www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001" so I don't get hit with duplicate content.

After this and over the next 6-9 months, I plan to fill in all of the custom content for each product. Then I plan to remove the canonical tag once I have custom content on that page.

Does this sound like the correct approach?

I have an ecommerce website which sells a product that has many different variations based on a vehicle’s make, model, and year. Currently, we sell this product on one page “www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001” and we show a modal to sort through each make, model, and year. This is important because based on the make, model, and year, we have different prices/configurations for each. For example, for the Jeep Wrangler and Jeep Cherokee, we might have different products:

Ultimate Pet Liner - Jeep Wrangler 2011-2013 - $350

Ultimate Pet Liner - Jeep Wrangler 2014 - 2015 - $350

Utlimate Pet Liner - Jeep Cherokee 2011-2015  - $400

Although the typical consumer might think we have 1 product (the Ultimate Pet Liner), we look at these as many different types of products, each with a different configuration and different variants.

We do NOT have unique content for each make, model, and year. We have the same content and images for each. When the customer selects their make, model, and year, we just search and replace the text to make it look like the make, model, and year. For example, when a custom selects 2015 Jeep Wrangler from the modal, we do a search and replace so the page will have the same url (www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001) but the product title will say “2015 Jeep Wrangler”.

Here’s my problem:

We want all of these individual products to have their own unique urls (cargoliner.com/products/2015-jeep-wrangler) so we can reference them in emails to customers and ideally we start creating unique content for them. Our only problem is that there will be hundreds of them and they don’t have unique content other than us switching in the product title and change of variants. Also, we don’t want our url www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001 to lose its link juice.

Here’s my question(s):

My assumption is that I should just keep my url: www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001 and be able to sort through the products on that page. Then I should go ahead and make individual urls for each of these products (i.e. cargoliner.com/products/2015-jeep-wrangler) but just add a “nofollow noindex” to the page.

Is this what I should do?

How secure is a “no-follow noindex” on a webpage? Does Google still index?

Am I at risk for duplicate content penalties?

Thanks!

Thanks for your response Don. I have a followup question for you.

I did understand your your t-shirt example but I think it's even more refined in our case. Since there are so many different variants, we do have to count them as different products, and we would like to avoid creating custom content right away (there's just so much we would have to create). I'm still thinking our perfect solution would be custom links but with a canonical tag pointing back to "www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001".

Here's my solution based on your advise:

I'm going to keep my main page where people can sort to find there make, model, and year (www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001).

Then I plan to have specific product pages per make, model, and year which will have duplicate content except for the make, model, and year searched and replaced. ie Jeep Wrangler 2015-2016 will be "www.cargoliner/products/jeep-wrangler-2015-2016" and in that page I will have a canonical tag point back to "www.cargoliner.com/products.php?did=10001" so I don't get hit with duplicate content.

After this and over the next 6-9 months, I plan to fill in all of the custom content for each product. Then I plan to remove the canonical tag once I have custom content on that page.

Does this sound like the correct approach?