Canonicalising a product with multiple variants

[SimonKenworthy]

I am working with an ecommerce site and have encountered an issue I haven't come across before and would appreciate some advice on how to proceed.

There are multiple variation products with one master product and then up to 20 or 30 variant products, the variation could be colour, size or both. The site has been set up to canonicalise all the variations to the master variant product, which I understand to be best practice. But, this is where the issue occurs, the master variant product URL 302 redirects to one of the variant product URLs. Example below. My question is, is this harmful to our SEO efforts? Would be be best to canonicalise to a preferred colour or size variation?

EXAMPLE:

Master variant product: www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123

Seeing this product on the page and clicking will 302 redirect to www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456

On page www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 the canonical tag is www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

[SimonKenworthy]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for your response. At the moment we have around 2000 products and some of the canonical pages do rank, others don't so it does seem the search engine in confused.

The article on SiteBulb is really interesting and I agree with your reasoning to canonicalise to either the most vanilla or popular product variant.

Many thanks,

Simon

[NickSamuel]

Hi Simon,

Quick question which I think I can guess the answer, does the current canonical page rank for anything at all?

Can't the developers make the canonical a static page (which currently redirects) default to the most popular and or a vanilla combination of product attributes?

That would of course be the best option, failing that you would have to just canonicalise to the most popular product variation and do so in a way that doesn't create a redirect chain.

I literally just referenced SiteBulb in another post, and I don't want to come across like a shill but there's a great explanation of it your issue here: https://sitebulb.com/hints/indexability/canonical-hints/canonical-points-to-a-redirecting-url/

Easier said than done for sure with some CMS and E-Commerce sites, but as the aforementioned link says...it's generally dealt with on a case by case basis.

Appreciate this is isn't a definitive answer but I hope it helps!

Nick