Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
-
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors.
I have two routes I could take:
a) Make 50 separate product pages
Pros:
-Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats.
-Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat).
Cons:
-Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color)
b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants
Pros:
-More elegant and organized
-NO duplicate Content
Cons:
-Losing out on color specific search terms
-Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions.
Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
-
Do people really search for red Boston Bruins hats? Or do they search for Boston Bruins hats? Frankly, as a consumer, I'd find it annoying to have to sort through that many more pages if you implemented A. But since color may be important, I'd make it a filter as AWC suggests. I'm not familiar with Shopify, so don't know if it's built in. If not, I'd build it. I'd address your last usability concern the same way - i.e., customize your software.
-
Plan B with a left nav color filter if you have it or are capable of implementing it.
-
I would go definitely with B
**BUT **If you would like to go with A because based on your data (site search and other inteligence tools and business goals )
I would create 50 urls and use the rel canonical for the ranking candidate for each product.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What to do with sold product pages when everything you sell are unique one off items
Hi there, This is something i have been unsure of for years. It's a little different to most ecom website situations. What would you do with product pages when every product is a "one off" unique product and once sold will never be for sale again? Should i redirect to a category page? 404? Leave it as is marked as sold or say it is sold and show links to similar items? At the moment we have 700 products for sale but over 5000 sold products that have their own product page and my concern is as this grows it could become a lot for a WordPress woocommerce site to handle? I don't want to do anything to slow my site down or unnecessarily bloat it but i want to do the right thing by the visitor and also not do anything to hurt my rankings. These pages often rank in google and may have been there for years before the item actually sells. To throw another curve ball, there may be multiple other products (for sale or already sold) with the exact same name but are unique and different from each other. These products pages will often be 98% the same content as each other too. To explain how this could be the case, we sell artworks from many different artists, Every artwork is an original and is unique. But many artists paint the same subject matter multiple times, albeit in a slightly different way from previous times. So you end up with a unique product that has everything the same as another (same artist, same name of artwork, same size, same description, different image, different sku) but is actually different and unique. This has left me somewhat uncertain of what is best to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scottlinklater0 -
Topical keywords for product pages and blogs
Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Ecommerce Site - Duplicate product descriptions & SKU pages
Hi I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site. At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates. Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL? Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site? I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update. Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0 -
Multiple URLs for the same page
I am working with a client and recently discovered that they have several URLs that go to the same page. http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMarketingandDesign
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FS
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=FF
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=ffhttp://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=MShttp://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF#
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?.nav=FF I am afraid this is happening all over the site. So, my question is: Is this hurting the SEO and how? If so what is the best way to go about fixing this problem? Thanks for your help!0