Ecommerce Product Attributes

[pabloid]

Hi everyone,

I've been a long time follower of the board but haven't posted before!

I have a query regarding e-commerce product attributes and unique pages. I currently deal with a website that sells both men's and women's blue widgets..

Currently when clicking on the "mens" or "womens" buttons on the category pages, the products update using AJAX and the URL remains the same.

My question is, would it be better to take these attributes onto separate pages, creating two extra pages?

The pages would then be:

blue widgets
mens blue widgets
womens blue widgets

but each of these would contain similar products.

Do you think if I create unique content for each of these pages that I will be able to get away with the duplicate products? If I can it will mean that the number of pages on my site will almost triple, which offers a lot of potential if I can get them indexed!

Any thoughts or opinions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

[GlobalMax]

It depends on how significant the differentiating attributes are. If the product is different for men vs women, definitely split. If the product is the same, but you wish to provide separate messages to the different audiences, split. Similarly, if the attribute distinguishes the message you wish to convey, split.

If the product is the same, and the differentiating attribute is insignificant, I'd not split. Color, for example, is probably not an attribute that merits a split.

When you split, there's a trade-off between convenience to the user of having everything about a product on a single page, and having common content factored out to a separate page that services multiple products. I tend to favor factoring out common content. It seems more logical to me; there's no duplicate content concerns; I value being able to address content details at a finer resolution; and I think user appreciation for cleaner pages can offset the convenience of having everything on a single page.

[goodroi]

Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Having more pages is generally only a good thing if those pages contain a significant amount of unique content. If you have a different product description that is quite lenghty for the men & womens page then go ahead. If the only difference is the model number I would not go ahead.

[Planet13]

If the only difference is the model number I would not go ahead.

I would sort of turn this on its head, if you will allow me.

If your description for both men and woman's widgets are more-or-less the same, then maybe you need new descriptions...

While I agree that if the descriptions are similar, then you don't need to split the pages, I also have to state that if your descriptions are similar, they probably aren't going to be very enticing to your potential customers.

There are some things that are truly unisex out there, and those you can keep together in the single URL. But if there is really and difference at all between the products, I really think they should be on different pages with different descriptions GEARED TOWARD THE PARTICULAR TARGETED GENDER.

anyway, just my two cents.

[pabloid]

Cheers guys, that's given me a new perspective!