Question: e-commerce products category optimization

Hello guys,

A question:

We run a website on Shopify and we do quite okay in terms of SEO. We found how to manage our stock easier, but the problem is:
Let's say we have a product /product-1 with a different color selection. Products with different colors look like this: /product-1?variant=32026172850289. Surely they are not indexed, but is it okay to have these not-indexed products in our category? Will it harm our results in the long term?

Currently here's how it looks like in our categories:

Original indexed product, then 5 options with ?variant=32026172850289, then one original and etc.

So it's like we have 5 indexed original products and 20 other not-indexed variations in the category.

Thanks!

Google knows how e-commerce works, so don't waste too much effort over it

KHer0 said:

Google knows how e-commerce works, so don't waste too much effort over it

Click to expand...

So can we list our products in that way?

We have done SEO for a few brands,
We always focus on Category page optimization because products change frequently.
If your eCommerce is where the product stays the same, then you can also work on the product page.

If you need any help then send details in DM to discuss.

Do they have a proper canonical to the main product? There is no problem with having them not-indexed and showing in categories, in fact thats correct as long as canonical is pointing towards main product.

It doesn't matter coz links your site would be ranked on shops where images matter most.

Don't worry, this doesn't affect the main product

Tristan Hektor said:

So can we list our products in that way?

Click to expand...

If you want the high techy guru seo answer style, you should set canonical tag to all your similar products links to your main product so that it won't be considered as duplicate.

If you want the real practical answer, it doesn't really matter as the crawler is smart to understand what is going on, so as I said before, don't too much effort optimizing it. Just treat it as different products.