Best URL Structure for Product Pages?

[dianeb152]

I am happy with my URLs and my ecommerce site ranks well over all, but I have a question about product URL's. Specifically when the products have multiple attributes such as "color".

I use a header URL in order to present the 'style' of products,

www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-LIST

and I  allow each 'color' to have it's own URL so people can send or bookmark a specific item.

www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-ANCH1

www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-WRCH1

I use a rel canonical to show that the header URL is the URL search engines should be indexing and to avoid duplicate content issues from having the exact same info, MP3's, PDF's, Video's accessories, etc on each specific item URL. I also have a 'noindex no follow' on the specific item URL.

These header URLs rank well, but when using tools like SEOMoz, which I love, my header pages fail for using rel canonical and 'noindex no follow'

I've considered only having the header URL, but I like the idea of shoppers being able to get to the specific product URL.

Do I need the no index no follow? Do I even need the rel canonical? Any suggestions?

[Dr-Pete]

I think that canonicalizing the colors/variations back up to the "root" product is a good bet - while those color variations are technically unique, they can look like thin content to Google, especially at a large scale. A couple of suggestions, though:

(1) I wouldn't use the canonical tag AND Meta Robots (noindex) - it could confuse the crawlers. In this case, since there are separate URLs for the colors/variations and people might link to those, I'd just keep the canonical and drop the Meta Robots.

(2) I think our crawler might be tripping up on the id="" reference in the Meta Robots tag, but I'm not 100% sure. That shouldn't be an issue for Google, although I try to keep those tags free of ids and other extra attributes.

(3) In general, you don't need a Meta Robots tag for all bots and Googlebot separately (especially if the behaviors are the same). I don't think it's a problem here, but it's not necessary.

[dianeb152]

Thank you, I appreciate the time you spend to understand and answer my question!

[dianeb152]

I'm looking at the id= reference. I have:

<meta id="ctl00_robots" name="ROBOTS" content="robots" /><meta id="ctl00_googlebot" name="GOOGLEBOT" content="googlebot" />

What would you change that to?

[Dr-Pete]

I'd just keep the general ROBOTS variant and drop the ID:

The id="" shouldn't hurt, but it may be messing with our crawlers (Google should be ok). The additional GOOGLEBOT directive is repetitive.

[dianeb152]

thanks again!