Handling of product variations and colours in ecommerce

[Storesco]

Hi,

our site prams.net has 72.000 crawled and only 2500 indexed urls according to deep crawl mainly due to colour variations (each colour has its own urls now). We now created 1 page per product, eg

http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini

and noindexed all the other ones, which had a positive effect on our seo.

http://www.prams.net/catalogsearch/result/?q=002.030.059.0

I might still hurt our crawl budget a lot that we have so many noindexed pages. The idea is now to redirect 301 all the colour pages to this main page and make them invisible. So google do not have to crawl them anymore, we included the variations in the product pages, so they should still be searchable for google and the user.

Does this make sense or is there a better solution out there? Does anyone have an idea if this will likely have a big or a small impact?

Thanks in advance.

Dieter

[GlobeRunner]

Whenever you have products that are similar (but only different in color variations or size variations), you should use the canonical tag to specify this. Keep these URLs indexed, but generally speaking the canonical tag is there to help in these situations.

There are literally thousands (or hundreds of thousands?) of sites using the canonical tag successfully.

[Storesco]

Oleg,

thanks, do you have an example of somebody, who did this?

Thanks in advance

Dieter

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yes, that would do good. Since content is identical for each of these products, there should only be 1 URL with all of the variations of that product in order to consolidate all of the authority. If you want to keep all of the variations in search, look into creating anchor links that point to the same "master" url. e.g. http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini-buggy-lightweight-union-jack-b can be linked as http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini#union-jack

That way, the URL is the structure is more SEO friendly but aesthetically the site is identical.