Thanks Lewis.

Yes that is what I thought. We don't manage their website in terms of development so this may be out of the question. I will check if the colours are conflicting in any way first. If this fails I think you are correct in that they will need to make the content more unique.

Tricky one isn't it as it is JUST the colour that changes, the products are exactly the same.

Many thanks

Hi there,

We are currently doing an SEO audit of an ecommerce website and we ar eunsure on the best practice in terms of using canonical link tag for some product variations.

An example is that the company has a product with two colour variations: Black and Tan. These are for the same product and have 99% the same content. Within the content of the page the colour is the only thing that changes (along with the meta information and imagery of course).

My question is should we choose one product and canonically link back to that one i.e. Black is the main product and we link Tan back to this via a canonical link?

Many thanks in advance.

Hi Khem

Yes I fully understood your response, thank you.

We always do sumbit a sitemap file for every site we build however we never really update the sitemap from there on, we tend to leave the search engines to crawl the site in order to find new pages or detect pages that have been removed.  I assume this is a normal practice for many other developers out there?

We always do a 301 redirect for pages which have been un-published such as old products and categories.

My main concern was actually creating a new sitemap file every day and if this would have any effect on the existing rankings, or crawl rate of the site. I guess not!

Kris

Hi all

I recently purchased the full licence of XML Sitemap Generator (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html) but have yet used it.

The idea behind this is that I can deploy the package on each large e-commerce website I build and the sitemap will be generated as often as I set it be and the search engines will also be pinged automatically to inform them of the update. No more manual XML sitemap creation for me!

Now it sounds great but I do not know enough about pinging search engines with XML sitemap updates on a regular basis and if this is a good or bad thing?

Can it have any detrimental effect when the sitemap is changing (potentially) every day with new URLs for products being added to the site?

Any thoughts or optinions would be greatly appreciated.

Kris