Ecommerce SEO - Canonicalize product variations?

LorenzoLD said:

Hi everyone,

One of our sites has been struggling through the rankings and experiences a lot of heavy dancing every few months.
Generally the on-site SEO is strong with link structure, internal linking, and content.
But this site is a mid-sized ecommerce store and a lot of the products have 3-5 colour variations which are on different URL's using the same product description and the pages are nearly copies except for 2 different words in each title.

We have been considering at canonicalizing these products to point to just one of the variations but this will require a lot of work so want your views first.

Question...
Since there's only about 3-5 'duplicate' product URL's of each product, will this be having enough of an impact on site SEO to warrant spending the time canonicalizing them all?

Thanks in advance for your help.

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bartosimpsonio said:

Maybe you should group the shallower content for variations under sections for one product page.

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LorenzoLD said:

Are you suggesting pulling all the variations in to one page?

We had considered this but for usability it is better for the variations to sit on different pages/URLs

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bartosimpsonio said:

Shallow content will kill your rankings. Grouping a bunch of shallow content into one page has helped me boost many products.

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LorenzoLD said:

Thanks for the thoughts. Would you say that by grouping them and reducing all of the thin content it improved SEO across the site e.g. category pages above products, or just the product pages themselves?

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