Shop by... - extra URLs

[Case]

Hi people

We're going to be adding a new feature to our site to help people shop by product type, price etc. It's pretty standard e-commerce stuff but not something we have in place at the moment.

My concern is the extra number of pages (URL's) this would create with very similar data on them.

For example, when you go to category it would show as /category.html

If you were to select one of the options eg. 'Colour: White'...

Do you think the page URL should change to something like: /category.html?colour=white

or

Should the page URL stay as just /category.html and only the page content changes?

What would be the idea soultion from a search engine point of view? (It doesn't need to be either of the ones listed above. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to let me know!)

Cheers!


EDIT: I suppose another question here would be "Can Googlebot's submit forms and follow these links anyway?" - If not, I guess there isn't really an issue because it couldn't get to these new pages.

[Indizine]

each unique URL will be seen to be different, but I assume you will be using search engine friendly URLs which will give you that anyway so they look like this:

http://www.tinytotsbabyshop.co.uk/Nursery-Lighting/

and

http://www.tinytotsbabyshop.co.uk/Baby-Lighting/

and all would be indexed and (eventually and hopefully) rank in their own right, despite containing some of the same words because the products are the same but different types, models, colours, sizes, etc. But the fact they are different makes each URL unique.

[Case]

OK, thanks for the reply.

We might be able to add something to the page title, h1 tag etc just to reflect the product type the user has selected. Hopefully this would help with duplicate content issues.

[Indizine]

your ecommerce shop (depending which one you are using) would normally automatically create the SEF dynamic URL's based on the pages and products.

[LOS Design UK]

What ecom software are you using?

The reason I ask is that the SEF URL's is not a standard operation for php etc, it will require htaccess work.

Regards
Daren

[Indizine]

are you attempting all of this yourself?

[openmind]

Just add "nofollow" to the new product link and it won't be a problem. Also have a look at the canonical tag which tells Google and others what the real URL is...

[Case]

Its a custom system we've built. I work with the developer to make it as SEO friendly as poss. We already have SEF URL's, this was just a query regarding these new pages we would be creating

Within reason, we can pretty much do what we want with it. That's why I am curious what the best possible solution would be and we would work towards that.

[Case]

Just add "nofollow" to the new product link and it won't be a problem. Also have a look at the canonical tag which tells Google and others what the real URL is...

The links to the product pages would remain the same. There is only ever 1 possible product page URL. This is more to do with creating extra category page URL's.

Would putting no follow on the links to these 'Shop by...' options work? So basically stopping the search engine from using this feature at all. That would be ideal really, the site is SEF as it is. If I could keep this new feature as purely something for our customers then there isn't an issue here.

[openmind]

Should do yes. Our system for example allows users to have products in more than one category. The product page is always the same but it might be listed in one more than one department.

To get round the problem, users select their primary department and links to the product page from all the other departments it's listed in have nofollow added to the links.

The same principle could be applied to your price filters.