3

I read that it is best practices that if you have a product that comes in 3 colours to have one URL for the product, and then to have a dropdown with all the colours that it comes in?

For example if I had a shirt that comes in 3 colours, grey, green and blue then you will have to have 1 URL like:

www.example.com/product/1001/brand-shirt instead of:

www.example.com/product/1001/brand-shirt-grey
www.example.com/product/1001/brand-shirt-green
www.example.com/product/1001/brand-shirt-blue

So now my question is, if you are using the one URL for the product, how do you promote the green shirt? How do you direct a customer to the green shirt? How do you share just the green on Facebook, Twitter, etc?

Improve this question
1

Often you'll see a query string appended to the URL. So /product/1001/brand-shirt may be the canonical URL, but /product/1001/brand-shirt?colour=green may be used to link directly to that version. Then you can use the URL Parameters feature in Search Console as explained here.

Alternatively some JavaScript-y bits may be used, like /product/1001/brand-shirt#blue .

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/product/1001/brand-shirt"> should be in between the <head></head> tags of your page either way.

Improve this answer
0
1

I would go also for one main URL. Why? Because in general, people don't search for a "green tee-shirt" on Google, they search a "tee-shirt" or a "Calvin Klein tee-shirt", whatever the colour; they only choose the colour when they see the tee-shirt on the website. I think that is the main reason why one main URL with a drop down list for the colour is the best option. Moreover, imagine that tomorrow, you want to share a "Calvin Klein tee-shirt" (whatever the colour), you can only do it easily if you have one main URL with all colour accessible with a drop down list (you're not going to share one URL by colour).

Then, you can manage the colour of the tee-shirt with URL parameters (?colour=green) or an id (#green). You just need to put the "rel=canonical" tag (http://www.example.com/product/1001/brand-shirt) on all versions of the main URL to avoid duplicate content issues.

Therefore, by managing URL parameters or an id for the colour, you can easily share the "green tee-shirt" (if you really want to).

Improve this answer
0

The best way is imho:

  • to have only one URL,
  • to show all product variants as images + additional descriptions,
  • to let the buyer select, which variant he buys, only at the checkout routine, i.e. as a checkbox value.

more URLs == more troubles, independently of how the URLs are built, with parameter or not.

The way through anchor, like example.com/product#variant is good too, because the anchor value isn't transferred with URL.

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.