Keyword Self Cannibalization and E-Commerce

[bjs2010]

I run a Magento shop - let's imagine a situation where the category landing page, is about "Joe Bloggs Kettles"

Then on that page, we have the products listed ; so we would have links to products pages - these links will be called something like:
Joe Bloggs Red Kettle
Joe Bloggs Yellow Kettle
Joe Bloggs Purple Kettle

Can someone please tell me if this is ok or should we rework our strategy?

Thanks

[EGOL]

If I was selling Joe Bloggs Kettles in three different colors.  We would dedicate ONE page to it instead of four.  Instead of having a category page I would have one sales page with all three items listed.  Three separate product pages would not be used.

That reduces the number of pages on your site and I believe that compact sites compete better than fat ones.

That allows you to place all of the content for these products on one page instead of spreading it across four.   Richer content pages generally rank higher.

In my opinion this is also better for the shopper because he can compare colors and any price difference on a single page.  If you have four pages for these product the shopper might need to do some clicking around to compare and that could result in lower sales.  Give them everything that they need on one page.

Less work and less bandwidth for you too!

[KempRugeLawGroup]

If you do it the way you are suggesting, you can end up with a duplicate content problem. I did some work for an online pet store that set their products up the way you are describing. For example, yellow dog bowl, red dog bowl, green dog bowl. However, we couldn't have different pages with the same description and just change the colors around. The pages were being flagged as duplicate content. So, we had to rewrite unique descriptions for every page, even though only the color was different. That's a pain. So, if you go the multi-page route, be prepared to have to do that.

[bjs2010]

Thanks EGOL,

I agree with most of your points - but similarly, wouldn't unique content for each different colour, eg., a content writer to write unique interesting content, would results in 5 potential pages in SERPS as opposed to just 1 ?

[EGOL]

I used to have separate pages for "each color" and other product variations.  However, I changed to one larger page for the entire product group and it has worked better in my opinion.