Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
-
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
-
Ah cool! I am glad it has worked out.
-
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
-
I am not 100% sure, but I think with this case you could only use the product page itself.
I need to digg into this a littlebit more before giving you an accurate answer.
-
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!
-
Hi Tom,
I would only change the picture and the price (if applicable). The text could also change is some proportion (for example the size description, color description, etc).
Gr.,
Istvan
-
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!
-
Hi Tom,
What I would do is that I would use the same url and different parameter for the SKU-s.
I will point out an example:
www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html?sku=skunumber
on the product page you would have a canonical link to: www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html
I hope that helped,
Istvan
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
-
Best way to deal with 100 product pages
It feels good to be BACK. I miss Moz. I left for a long time but happy to be back! 🙂 My client is a local HVAC company. They sell Lennox system. Lennox provides a tool that we hooked up to that allows visitors to their site to 'see' 120+ different kind of air quality, furnace and AC units. They problem is (I think its a problem) is Google and other crawl tools are seeing these 100+ pages that are not unique, helpful or related to my client. There is a little bit of cookie cutter text and images and specs and that's it. Are these pages potentially hurting my client? I can't imagine they are helping. Best way to deal with these? Thank you! Thank you! Matthew
Technical SEO | | Localseo41440 -
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Moving wordpress to it's own server
Our company wants to remove wordpress from our current windows OS server at provider 1 and move it to a new server at provider 2. Godaddy handles our DNS. I would like to have it on the same domain without masking. I would like to make a DNS entry on godaddy so that our current server and our new server can use the same URL (ie sellstuff.com). But I only want the DNS to direct traffic to our current server. The goal here is to have the new server using the same URL as the old server so nothing needs to be masked once traffic is redirected with a 301 rule in the htaccess file. But no traffic outside of the 301 rule will end up going to the new server. I would then like to edit the htaccess file on our current server to redirect to the new servers IP address when someone goes to sellstuff.com/blog. Does this make since and is it possible?
Technical SEO | | larsonElectronics0 -
Will a Robots.txt 'disallow' of a directory, keep Google from seeing 301 redirects for pages/files within the directory?
Hi- I have a client that had thousands of dynamic php pages indexed by Google that shouldn't have been. He has since blocked these php pages via robots.txt disallow. Unfortunately, many of those php pages were linked to by high quality sites mulitiple times (instead of the static urls) before he put up the php 'disallow'. If we create 301 redirects for some of these php URLs that area still showing high value backlinks and send them to the correct static URLs, will Google even see these 301 redirects and pass link value to the proper static URLs? Or will the robots.txt keep Google away and we lose all these high quality backlinks? I guess the same question applies if we use the canonical tag instead of the 301. Will the robots.txt keep Google from seeing the canonical tags on the php pages? Thanks very much, V
Technical SEO | | Voodak0 -
Akamai's Edge Redirector good for SEO?
Hey guys, Just wondering if anyone has used/tested Akamai's new 'Edge Redirector' cloudlet?http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/edge-redirector.html It seems like it would be a better/faster option than redirects at the server level via htaccess.. thoughts? Thanks!,
Technical SEO | | wojkwasi
Woj1 -
Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx The title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237 Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top? I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this. I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO. NIck
Technical SEO | | Istoresinc0 -
Pros and Cons of Rel Author on Product Pages
I've heard that having rel=author enabled on your pages can be great for increasing click through rate but you should not use it on every page on your site. What are the pros and cons of using rel=author on product pages? Do you use rel=author on your product pages or just on your blog articles?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe1 -
What's the website that analyzes all local business submissions?
I was recently looking at a blog post here or a webinar and it showed a website where you could see all of the local sites (yelp, Google places) where your business has been submitted. It was an automated tool. Does anyone remember the name of the site?
Technical SEO | | beeneeb0