Does it matter

ve an ecommerce site and right now I have landing pages for brands and product types. I want to create custom landing pages for certain keywords, think something along the lines of “black running shoes”, to exist separate from my landing page for just “running shoes”. Since these new landing pages will have roughly the same products, will Google treat the new pages as duplicates of my existing landing pages? Or is a different H1 and ~20% different products enough to be counted as unique?

So I get this question quite a bit with people promoting websites and I think it is important to ask yourself the purpose of creating multiple pages. Oftentimes it is tempting to think that if you have more pages on your site that it will equal more traffic. With updates in search engines it is actually not a great thing to have thousands of similar pages. Google and other search engines will see this as a bloated site and your poor rankings pages can actually hurt your well ranking ones.

Oftentimes I will see a huge increase in rankings and traffic by getting rid of variable pages that have similarities and just focusing on the main pages.

So I ask again what is the purpose of the multiple pages. If you are looking only to target multiple keywords with a similar variation then I would suggest only having one page. You can add in tags or categories to alert search engines that your shoe for instance has a black, white and grey version all on one page. You could also go as far as having one page for men’s and women’s shoes that are the same type.

Where you want to have different pages is with unique products like shirts vs. shoes. You will have different shoppers, profiles and searches for these vs. someone who might be looking for all shoes of that type.

E commerce can be very complicated so feel free to give us a call for a quick consult on how you should structure your pages in a way that search engines will find helpful.