packblitz Posted June 25, 2010 Posted June 25, 2010 Hi, this is a general SEO question. I have a competitor that sells the same product as we do. Let's say it's a t-shirt and it comes in multiple colors. We have the t-shirt as 1 product id and use products attributes to offer it as 'Small-Black', 'Small-Red', 'Small-White', 'Medium-Black', etc. Our competitor will offer 3 different product ids. For example the product is 'White T-shirt' with options Small, Medium, Large, X-Large and 'Black T-shirt' with options Small, Medium, Large, X-Large, you get the idea. From an SEO standpoint it seems like their way of doing things is better because they have 3 products for Google to index and thus a bigger target for when somebody searches for 'T-shirt'. They have 3 product pages that a user could land on, we have 1 product page they could land on. Is their way of doing it better than ours? Keep in mind, the product descriptions will be identical for the 3 different product pages on the competitor web site. Taking this another step further, I've thought of doing some programming to mimic the competitor's system. I would still have 1 product id, but when my product has more than 1 color available it would show each picture in my product listing. The best way to explain what I'm talking about is too see the first few polos on this page: http://www.gap.com/browse/category.do?cid=5216 The one that's listed as 'The new classic polo' is shown in olive, charcoal, and navy. They all link to the same product but it's shown 3 times on the page, with just a slightly different URL. I'm using 'SEO URL's' on my site and was thinking of doing it so the links would be 'tshirt-olive-2199.html', 'tshirt-charcoal-2199.html', 'tshirt-navy-2199.html'. Would I be penalized by the search engines for providing 3 different links in a row like that, that basically all link to the same page? The links on the Gap page are: http://www.gap.com/browse/product.do?cid=5216&vid=1&pid=717991&scid=717991242'>http://www.gap.com/browse/product.do?cid=5216&vid=1&pid=717991&scid=717991242 http://www.gap.com/browse/product.do?cid=5216&vid=1&pid=717991 http://www.gap.com/browse/product.do?cid=5216&vid=1&pid=717991&scid=717991022 Thanks in advance!
MartinWann Posted June 28, 2010 Posted June 28, 2010 there is no reason for penalty. But Google will show only one page on the serp.
packblitz Posted June 28, 2010 Author Posted June 28, 2010 Wouldn't there be 3 results on the SERP- 'tshirt-olive-2199.html', 'tshirt-charcoal-2199.html', 'tshirt-navy-2199.html'?
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