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I would go back to them and ask them why they wouldn't just add a section to their existing website to cover the new multisites multitechnic maintenance activity.

Option 1

If you use a sub domain or a concatenation of it as you have shown with the hyphen it simply looks bad from a URL perspective. One could argue that visually it is very spammy. Remember in the not too distant past you would have domains like www.the-best-maintenance-contractor.com (I made that up!) ? - It just looks unprofessional.

Option 2

The second option - to set up a new brand involves much more than just buying a new domain. There is a whole host of branding issues and SEO problems to consider:

No Domain Authority
New Logo
New Stationery
New Socials
New Email Addresses
New Google Tools etc etc etc

Plus the fact that a new brand name and URL can take a year to properly proliferate and find its optimum position in Google. You would effectively be starting from scratch.

Option 3

My preference in this case would be to use a folder for the new activity vis:

myccompany.com/maintenance

Then use sub categories of that.

myccompany.com/maintenance/activity1
myccompany.com/maintenance/activity2

etc

This will achieve much better results in SERPS as the company already exists and presumably already has Domain Authority.

You just need to tell them.

I hope that helps

Nigel

David's right if your right click 'view page source' in chrome you will see:

This tag appears on every page of the site.

Remove the tag but also check the backlink profile and check you are not listed in a load of dodgy low DA directories. It may highlight any other issues you may have.

Pleasure jurginga

Hi Isabelle

I think may be look around at some existing retailers.

Halfords is one of the biggest in the UK where I am and they don't have a problem with either way.

Here they list with a colour swatch on the category page with a colour and frame size drop down on the product page.

http://www.halfords.com/cycling/bikes/mountain-bikes/carrera-vengeance-womens-mountain-bike

As long as the image changes then the UX is perfect in my honest opinion.

Good luck

NIgel

This is one of the biggest problems for eCommerce stores like yours. I have worked with a lot and it is almost impossible to achieve a high ranking on a product where you have colour in the URL. This is because most of the descriptive content is the same, the only difference being the colour.

What you would be better doing here is to have one page for 'bike model X' - then have a drop down for colour, i.e 'pink' bike model X and 'red' bike model X. The drop down can be done as Ajax so that the page content and URL stays the same, the only thing that happens is that the image changes between colours.Some sites have colour as an attribute which appends to the end of the URL i.e

store/bike-model-x/#pink
store/bike-model-x/#red

in both cases the canonical is just 'store/bike-model-x' with the characters after the # not read or indexed by Google.

Canonicalizing, whilst offering a sticking plaster job is not correct because if the user is looking for pink, they will be presented with the red. It's not the right experience for the user.

Also if Google deems the two items to be markedly different they could show both colours in SERPS regardless, which defeats the object.

Most eCommerce solutions allow you to set up a core product, then add variations like colour and size. You will achieve much higher results in search by doing it this way.

Other Solutions:

1. Make the page content, Meta and H1s completely different - an onerous task as you would need to do this for every product in more than one colour - not ideal

2. Set up a tag of bike model x and canonicalize both colours to that - also far from ideal.

I hope this helps.

Nigel - Carousel Projects

I have a client who sells 50 brands of shoes. At the moment the developer has a noindex/nofollow tag on all sale pages which is wrong as around 10% of site activity revolves around those pages. The structure looks like this:

1. For Cats/Sub Cats

site/sale
site/womens/sale
site/womens/shoe/sale
site/womens/shoes/ballerinas/sale

For every cat/subcat - there are 10 cats and average 5 subcats per cat so 50 pages of sale.

2. For Brands

site/brand
site/brand/womens
site/sale/brand
site/sale/womens/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/subcat/brand

So each brand can have four sale pages on top of its own brand page. 50 brands x 54 = around 2700. Now no one is going to start writing 2700 pieces of additional on page content (although Meta is OK! ) and we risk further diluting the brand pages we need to show highly for,  so we need to do something.

Should we

Category Pages:

1. Allow all sale cat and subcat pages to proliferate through Google? or
2. Canonicalise all sale sub category pages back to category
3. Caonicalise all category and Subcategory pages back to sale/womens

Brand Pages:

1. Allow all sale brand pages to proliferate through Google ?
2. Canonicalise Sub Cat brand pages back to sale/category/brand
3. Canonicalise Sub Cat and Cat back to sale/brand

Note the lower pages never do well in search. If you search a brand + Sale in Google it is always the site/brand page that comes up, never the sale version (This is from research on other similar sites and my own analysis)

Same with Sub Cats - eg, Brand + Subcat - it's always site/brand that comes up first wand has the highest PA.

Also we can't analyse any of these sale pages in MOZ or anywhere else as they are not in search at all having been no indexed.

That's my conundrum for today, Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Having been there and done that I would warn against having two or more websites selling the same products with the same titles, numbers, pictures & descriptions.

If you must set up different domains with the same products then you must create two, three, (however many sites you have) different on page descriptions and preferable photographs, style titles, numbers and meta.

You should also consider the fact that it is likely that the sites will share a server and have the same cross site company information. Both of which can send negative information to Google and other search engines.

It is pure folly to expect to rank well for two or more sites selling exactly the same products with identical information. Not to mention the additional work associated with writing all the content, producing graphics and keeping the site up to date.

If you must put the category and sub-category in a URL then you must choose one. You should then canonicalize the others to this one version.

Some CMS systems allow you to choose one cat/sub-cat where a style's URL is created and it resides yet showing the style in other cats and sub cats. This is OK as it doesn't change the URL. If yours changes the URL then as I said canonicalize to just the one. But be consistent throughout the website.

Make sure the chose cat and sub cat have a reasonable amount of unique content and the meta is filled out correctly.

I always no index tags but keep categories. Then add unique content to each category heading to help with SEO. Some WP themes display the content, others don't. The problem with tags is they have a habit of appending themselves to all versions of a page so explode useless and low content pages.

It would take an age to caonicalise tags on most sites so in my opinion they are essentially worthless. You can always use MOZ to check the page ranks before deciding.