SEO on clothing colours

[chris ashdown]

We obviously use attributes to give a choice of colour's to the relevant products on our sites

My question is do you think a search for say Red Polo Shirt would bring up my product that was a polo shirt and the colour Red in the attributes, or would it only match polo shirt on its own so be very low down in the rankings below those with red polo shirt

Another option would be to include the word polo shirt in the attribute so it reads red polo shirt but a hell of a lot of work

[Mike Hughes]

Having 'red polo shirt' on the page will produce a better match in Google than not having it, so will do better. That on it's own is only one of many signals though so it's not going to be a game changer.

I thought it would be interesting to look into this for you but the results leave me concerned about your internet-workwear site in Google.

I couldn't find you in Google for 'polo shirts' or even for 'work polo shirts'. (compared with w*******express who were #73 and #1 respectively). And that was looking in the first 200-300 results before Google says 'do you really want to go any further? there's nothing else worth looking at'

I did find you in #65 for 'asquith fox polo shirts' but that's getting down to a very specific search term.

Have you looked in Google webmaster tools recently? There no warnings or suggestions in there are there?

[NormanRouxel]

This little lump of code will look for an Attribute named Colour and, if found, create a list of <choicename> <productname>.

E.g. Red Polo Shirt, Green Polo Shirt

<actinic:block type="AttributeList">
	<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22AttributeDisplayLabel%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20%22Colour%22" >
		<actinic:block type="Choice List"><actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22ListIndex%22%20%2f%3e%20%3e%201">, </actinic:block><Actinic:Variable Name="ChoiceDisplayLabel"/> <actinic:variable name="ProductName" /></actinic:block>
	</actinic:block>
</actinic:block>
<actinic:block type="ComponentList">
	<actinic:block type="AttributeList">
		<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22AttributeName%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20%22Colour%22">
			<actinic:block type="ChoiceList"><actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22ListIndex%22%20%2f%3e%20%3e%201">, </actinic:block><Actinic:Variable Name="ChoiceDisplayLabel"/> <actinic:variable name="ProductName" /></actinic:block>
		</actinic:block>	
	</actinic:block>		
</actinic:block>

You could put it in a product layout.

Or use it surrounded by a BlockIf containing PageType == "Product Page" to help generate a META tag.

P.S. It's shown multi-line and indented for readability. It would be better to remove all newlines and tabs and stick it on one long line to avoid generating unnecessary white space.

[Mike Hughes]

Chris, take a look in Google Webmaster Tools at 'Search Appearance'=>'HTML improvements'. I think you might find a lot of duplicate meta descriptions and title tags in there. If there are a lot, there's a good chance Google's Panda algorithm is going to pick up on this and bring your site down in the rankings. You really want to keep these warnings as low as possible.

[chris ashdown]

Hi Mike

Not a lot but working on them only 30