Different page for each product colour?

[Sparkstone]

Hi Guys,

I've just read an ecommerce article that suggests it's a good idea to have a different page for each colour that the product comes in. However surely this will mean duplicate content?

What are your thoughts? Have you put this tactic into motion and how did it go?

Thanks,

Dan

[MSTJames]

From experience, I would highly recommend combining multiple colours onto one page and having an option to select colour, and update photos if required.

We have spent the best part of a year combining variations of products to reduce product pages from 18,000+ to under 1000 and have seen very good SERP improvements because more of the site is being indexed, and there is less duplicate content.

At the end of the day, if nothing changes about a product other than its colour, or size etc then it does not need its own page - it doesn't benefit a user to have 2 pages to browse to make their colour selection.

[MattJanaway]

It would mean duplicated content if you kept the description the same, yep. However, there are many ways of saying the same thing... You would have to rewrite the descriptions for sure.

Whether or not it would give your website any benefit is hard to say without knowing which product it was you were thinking about splitting down and which keywords you were targeting for that product.

As an example. One of the sites I am working on sells plastic chains. We optimise the category page for the main plastic chain keywords, within the category we add the products and split them up based on colour. This allows us to target long-tail keywords such as "Green Plastic Chain". This benefits us because (even though they are fairly low) there are people searching for this term. If nobody is searching for your product in a specific colour then there is no real advantage other than having more content on your site.

On the other side of the coin, it does mean more clicks for visitors. As we know, more clicks often means losing visitors. The only real answer is to test test test. I always recommend using a combination of both methods after lots of testing and analysing.

Hope this helps?

Matt

[eyepaq]

That will only be an advantage if you have a lot of search volume using colors so you can actually have the color name embedded better in the on-page optimisation for each product.

On the other hand it is duplicate content as the pages are mainly the same - you can play with alternate and canonicals and some advantage will still come from the other pages but it's a hassle.

I would strongly suggest to have the colors on one single product page (unless the color plays a huge role (as far as search volume).

Just an add-on opinion - hope it helps.

[CMC-SD]

That's really interesting. I strongly believe that one page for each variation of a product, whether it's color or size, worsens user experience. But I'm working against a near-religious devotion to having as many pages as possible on the site, based on the idea that more pages definitely means better SEO. Any tips for overcoming that?