Magento Configurable Product & SEO

Question

I have switched my platform to Magento for little over 6-7 months now, and I am having some issues with my configurable products ranking in Google.

Before switching to Magento, our products we're ranking top 2-3 in Google's 1'st page. Currently 50% of our products are ranking in the 2nd or 3rd pages in Google.

We did a lot of research we cleaned a lot of problems like - clean URLs, Meta Tag Titles, duplicate tags, and much more other bugs from our website, which helped. When searching in Google for our selected products it seems like the "simple products" are performing better then the "configurable products".

Can anyone suggest if this is a problem that they know about, and what can I do to fix this ?

Answer 1

I can't comment yet (not enough rep!) but I can edit my answer after you provide some more info:

1. Do you want the simple products to also be for sale? In theory, they wouldn't be in a configurable product if you also didn't mind a customer just finding and purchasing the simple product.

Example: Configurable is Product A + Product B. The customer chooses the one that is right for them from the options presented there because the difference is, for example, only in color. So there is no reason to have both Product A and Product B also listed separately.

2. Do the simple products have the same description as the configurable products? One of the reasons configurable products exist is to solve this very problem of two products having almost exactly the same description but also having something (e.g. color) that makes them different.

Thanks!

Kaylie

Answer 2

You could try setting the canonical URL of your simple-product to the URL of your configurable product. We are currently testing it for some products but the rankings haven't really changed yet. Neither the simple products nor the configurable products.

Update:

This turned to be more of a bad idea. The configurable products got a better ranking, but not like substantially, just 2-3 rankings.

On the other side, our simple products got massively downrated. More interestingly, the pages disappeared completely from the google index. So even for keywords specificly aiming at that page, the master page was shown. As we have a ratio of about 1:35 in master:simple, we about 20% traffic through organic search and it took several months to recover. So if this is not what you want, you should think twice before doing it.