Hi guys, I was wondering if anyone could please shed some light on this please. We have an ecommerce store we are working on. This is the scenario: We have our category pages which has our products on them. What we want to do is display multiple products which all lead to one landing page(product page). So if you have hard drives then you display an 250Gb,500Gb and an 1Tb but they all lead to the same landing product page. On the product page you will be able to select your size and color from an drop down. What we would like to know is if google will find anything wrong with that way of displaying our products in terms of duplicate content...etc? from what I can gather it doesn't look like it could be a problem as its internal linking and not multiple products with the same or nearly the same content, which will cause duplicate content.
It will all depend on the content of your landing page. You would definitely need to make it distinct from the other pages.
Yeah it will be distinct from the rest, it will be the landing page for that series of products they just all link to that one landing page. From what I can see it won't be a problem, but still going to do some more research.
I guess you meant that each product has 4-5 versions of size,etc which automatic will generate 4-5 pages with same content. Well in that case to avoid duplicate on Google go with canonical tag!
Almost, it's more like there 4-5 versions of size,etc but they all lead to the same landing page. So they all have the same description describing them all, but its all on one page. If your on your category page you will see all the different versions of sizes,etc but if you click on one of them you you go to the same product page. What I wan't to know is, is will that be seen as duplicate content?
Yes. I had a case with a client. 1000 products on the site multiply with 4 versions of size multiply of 5 versions of colors was about 20 times more the results we need. And we implemented canonical tag, to avoid indexing duplicate content!
How did you implement the canonical tag on the links? I was thinking f using canonical tags, but as far as I know you can't add canonical tags to a link but only to the body of a page?
Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective. Ex: <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/quality-wrenches.htm"/> If you are going to implement the rel canonical tag, please make sure it is correct before you launch. If you are not sure on how to do it, Read This Post -Catastrophic Canonicalization- and Do some tests before!
I agree with moneykrap. To avoid duplicate content problem, the best option is canonical tag implementation. Actually it has been recommended by Google itself too. Check this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
Thanks. I know what it is and how it works I was just a little confused. The way I understand it is, when you select the version of the product in the category page it uses different URL parameters to automatically select the version you selected on the category page. I think I misunderstood it wrong, I was thinking that the URL parameters gets added to the URL to select the version you want automatically on the product page. But the thing is I was thinking its still the same page, but to google its all different versions of the same page? What I mean is: (original page) www.example.com/category/product (black color selected) www.example.com/category/product?color=black The way I understand it is, I point the second URL in the above example the the first original URL?