Index an URL without directly linking it?

[Adriaan.Multiply]

Hi everyone,

Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants.

Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and:

• Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site
• Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D).

So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not?

In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?

[Linda-Vassily]

That's an interesting question. Yes, I don't  see why you couldn't rank such a page—I have had some pages accidentally rank in an even less likely situation. (Marketing pages that accidentally got exported into the sitemap.)

But even if you make the different color choices canonical to the color choice page, a canonical is a suggestion and if Google decides that people are really, really looking for blue shoes when they do this search, that is the page that will rank.

[Is there a reason you can't have the color choice page along with the individual colors? You could strengthen the signals for the choice page by having more links to it.]