Google PLA: How to deal with product options

[inhouseseo]

I have many products that have options. For example, an item will be available in multiple finishes. I don't add each item as a separate product, I create options for the item:

123blue, 123black, 123bronze, 123white

There will be a product page for item 123, with drop-down options to choose the finish.

How do I deal with this with PLAs?

I want people to find the product when they search any of the product variations (123blue, 123black, 123bronze, 123white ).

Is there a separator I can use to add multiple MPNs for an item, like a "|"?

[FedeEinhorn]

How about setting some GET variables to differentiate options in the URL? I saw that on Amazon, when you change options, sometimes the page contents reload with the selected option, showing not only the selection but also some additional info about that particular selection, say images on selected colors, descriptions for that color, etc.

It could be a hard work to complete, but it will ultimately lead to more pages and probably more listings in Google. You should also use the "URL Parameters" under "Crawl" in Google Webmaster Tools to let Google know what those URL parameters do. For example if a get parameter "color=blue" then you can tell Google that the "color" parameter "Specifies".

You can read more here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en

Hope that helps!

[BrightHealth]

Annoying answer time...

The best route is to break everything down to its own item. Item x with different colors now becomes Item 123blue, Item 123black, Item 123bronze, Item123white. While it creates more work to break things out, you will have more searchable items, then your products have a higher chance of being found in both short & longtail search. Treat every product headline like a longtail seo page title.

If there's one way to lean in PLAs and your product feed, it is to lean towards more data than less data.

[Everett]

So will that require him to have separate landing pages for each? If so, he can use Federico's advice (don't forget the rel canonical to avoid having all of those duplicate pages with each color parameter!) to create separate URLs.

[FedeEinhorn]

I find that hard to swallow. If a product only changes colors, sizes, etc (basic things) the product is still the same, the description doesn't change, neither its features probably (unless we are talking for ie laptops with different screen size and same components).

That's why I suggest having only one page, you can even specify the available options in the description and therefore win the search for "blue t-shirt" and "white t-shirt". Making 2 pages will create a duplicate content issue and possibly a penalty (not manual, but algorithmic).

As Everett mentions, and I did too, if you don't use rel-canonical to point to a single page you will end up damaging the site. And, using canonical on both (parameter based URLs and full URL) actually tells the engine to index one of them. So why bother doing the others?

[Everett]

Federico I think you may be missing part of this. He is talking specifically about landing pages for Google Product Listing Ads. What you are saying is absolutely correct for organic search, but that is not what the person is asking. Please see Products Feed Specification for Google PLAs here with particular attention to the "link" section:

• If multiple products are on the same page, it has to be straightforward for the user to find the right product. We recommend only one product per page.
• For variations of the same product, we recommend that you submit URLs that pre-select the variant which the user clicked on in Google Shopping.

[FedeEinhorn]

I was, yes

Yet, the same rules apply. You just submit the feed and in the link you put the one that has the required attributes within the query string, right?

[BrightHealth]

Exactly. You'll have one landing page for the product, though you'll need multiple products within the feed with URLs pushing to the specific variant of the product.

So you'll push to Product X landing page, but when someone looks for Product X Blue Men's Medium Tall, the product feed will contain that and push to those exact settings. Simply having Product X in the feed is not good enough.

[Sorin_T]

Well this is a very interesting post. I had this issue before and the way I sorted it was to make sure that each product variation was updated individually to Google Merchant centre (with a custom label for the Product_Group_Id - so I can group them by their parent product.) with its own link which includes the preselected options. Works really fine for Magento 2 the only problem I came across is that this will only work on drop down options and not for the text swatch. I hope this helps a bit!