Product page SEO, listing variants as separate products

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So I read a trick somewhere that posting product variants as separate products helps with SEO and helps if a customer is searching for a particular configuration. For example, if you sell the same t-shirt in white, black and red, you list these three options as three separate products in case a customer searches for "red t-shirts", for example.

I have largely listed my products like this but I am starting to wonder if this is affecting user experience. A lot of stores in my niche seem to go the other extreme - they list one product but you can customize the hell out of it on the product page.

Any advice, any experience with this? Is it a PITA if you go to a store to shop and product variations are listed as separate products, instead of giving you the choice to select variants on the product page?

Thanks in advance!
#listing #page #product #products #seo #separate #variants
  • Profile picture of the author sbucciarel
    Banned
    As a customer, I'd rather see all of the options on the product page ... all of the colors and sizes, etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author marsh2015
    Listing the same product seperatly provides an exact keyword of what the consumer wants .Most of the consumers require an exact product of what they requested and this definately drives real organic traffic to your site .
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  • Profile picture of the author crediblezephyre
    This actually hurts with SEO. The main reason for this is there are multiple pages with the exact same content on it and none of them is the clear answer for a search term.

    Take basketball shoes for example. Let's say you sell basketball shoes in three colors; red, white, and blue. If you have a page for red basket ball shoes, one for white basketball shoes and one for blue... which one should Google show for the phrase "basketball shoes"? They're all equally qualified, they all have the exact same content. Basically, none of them will have the full effect that one, clear page would have.

    Best practices are normally to either have one page that houses all the variants or, if you do have separate pages, to canonicalize them (it's basically a tag that tells Google which page you WANT to rank without forcing you to get rid of the duplicate pages).

    At least this is my experience, some people may have different ideas.
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    • Profile picture of the author sbucciarel
      Banned
      Originally Posted by crediblezephyre View Post

      This actually hurts with SEO.
      This was my thoughts exactly ... that you're just creating a lot of duplicate content in addition to making it more difficult for your customers to see all of the options available.
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