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I recently posed this question the other way around, i.e. a site had different pages (technically totally unconnected) for each product variant and it caused certain problems: https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-through-product-variants

I am not sure if this 100% applies to you: I would not use "different model" and "variant" as synonyms. If they are different models, they are different, unique products and have distinct features, advantages, maybe extras etc. Variants, to me, are for example different colour, maybe the same model with different extras or similar. There might be some grey zone where different models might actually be quite like variants, differing little from each other - then I'd ask if they differ enough to say something about each and/or contrast them.

For different models I would in fact chose different pages that go deeper into details. (Think of different books from the same publisher!) For variants, having more than one page is problematic. If I had the free choice, I'd bundle all variants on a single page with dropdowns to select the variant. There is also the question if variants are sufficiently different to write unique content for each - if that is the case, it could justify separate pages. A definite benefit of those is that they can be linked directly.

Regards,

Nico

Thanks for the hint!

Personally, I am a big fan of schema.org and marking up all the products has been on my further ToDo list.

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for your reply. I'll have to check with the responsible developer - but I fear that this option is not on the table. Then again, I have been hinted at that a complete redesign might eventually be. As I said below: Nobody who does SEO seems to have been around when the site was created. And we all know what happens in such a case, don't we?

Hi Matt,

If it were only that easy... I have since learnt that way back when the client had that website developed he specifically asked to NOT have an ecommerce website. (I, nor anybody advising on SEO, was not around back then AFAIK.)

The products are not connected. They are litereally independently created pages with the same template. The URLs are not parameter based but look like

http://www.example.de/category/subcategory1/subcategory2/product_name-further_description_1

http://www.example.de/category/subcategory1/subcategory2/product_name-further_descripittion_2

So, identical apart from the last bit that is NOT a parameter. And the last bit might be "750-kg" or "Alu" or "with-brakes". Thanks for the advice; I agree that it is generally a good starting point but sadly not possible in this case.

Hi,

Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique.

The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals.

In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants.

As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product.

I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of!

Kind Regards,

Nico

Hi CleverPhD,

Thanks for your answer! The website is indeed a little dated and did not consider SEO - or so I have been informed.

http://www.g1.de/projekte.aspx is the URL with the most clearest problems, although similar tiles also exist on other pages. As you can see by checking the code, the URL is changed, albeit in a non-ideal way (parameter) and the page basically stays the same with only a tiny fraction of its content changed.

The USAtoday approach is interesting and I will look into it. I have a slight feeling, though, that the approach is quite a bit different(?).

Hi,

On one website, the "real" content is loaded via AJAX when the visitor clicks on a tile (I'll call a page with some such tiles a tile-page here). A parameter is added to the URL at the that point and the content of that tile is displayed. That content is available via an URL of its own ... which is  actually never called.

What I want to achieve is a canonicalised tile-page that gets all of the tiles' content and is indexed by google - if possible with also recognising that the single-URLs of a tile are only fallback-solutions and the "tile-page" should be displayed instead.

The current tile-page leads to duplicate meta-tags, titles etc and minimal differences between what google considers a page of its own (i.e. the same page with different tiles' contents).

Does anybody have an idea on what one can do here?

yeah, thanks. That helps.

Hi there,

I am aware that it is not good practice to have a redirect chain but I am not really sure hoe to do it (on Apache).

I have multiple redirects in a chain because on the one hand I had to redirect because the content of the site got a new URL and because on the other hand I changed from http to https. Thus I have a chain like

http://example.com via 301 to http://the-best-example.com via 301 to https://the-best-example.com via 301 to https://greatest-example.com

Obviously I want to clean this up without loosing any link juice or visitors who had bookmarked my site. So, I could make three separate redirects:

http://example.com via 301 to https://greatest-example.com
http://the-best-example.com via 301 to https://greatest-example.com
https://the-best-example.com via 301 to https://greatest-example.com

But is there a way to combine it? Can I use an "OR" operator to link the 3 conditions to this one rule?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks a lot!!!