: What should I do with my duplicate product page urls for best SEO impact? I have a link to a product page like this: /products/pandora-midcalf The page can be linked to from our internal

@Sent6035632

You can set canonicals, or make robots.txt rules, but you should also "teach" googlebot and bingbot how to use parameters on your site using their respective areas in webmaster tools. It is found under "Crawl > URL Parameters" in GWT sidebar. It is found under "configure my site > Ignore URL Parameters" in BWT sidebar. Its easier to teach googlebot since bingbot only understands how to ignore.

This may be a bit tricky though because unfortunately, you dont really use querystrings in your example (its more like a port). Is it possible to change syntax from /products/pandora-midcalf:13761 to /products/pandora-midcalf&hue=13761? It would be clearer this way and bots/scripts/apps could understand or use it better.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Bryan171

I will recommend you to set canonical to stop googlebot from seeing duplicated content. I can not see a better way to accomplish this.

Also for those slightly different same product pages I would recommend you to set a noindex, follow combination meta tag. In consequence similar pages will stop from appearing in SERP and send a strong message to google about what is the most important page. Also the follow instruction will help you to pass the juice from backlinks. If you are concerned about queries with different colors try to create an optimal meta description tag that list some of the most popular colors.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Hamaas447

It depends a bit on what you actually want to achieve:


do you want to turn the product sub-pages into real pages in the long run? Then go for individual urls, titles, images – and then you should also try to avoid Javascript to make the individual content search engine friendly. Actually you could also make javascript parameters crawlable – check for "hash-bang" (#!) to mark your parameters.
or do you rather want to strengthen the actual product pages by 'hiding' the sub-pages ? Then you should try to focus on the actual product pages and try to hide the subpages – you can use 301 redirects for external visitors and sitemaps (and other methods) to try to draw google's attention to the main product page.


Either way: try to avoid duplicate content by any means.

See also "Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs " and "Google, duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and you" from Google's official Webmaster Central Blog for further deteails on this matter.

Vote Up Vote Down