We talk about Amazon often here on Get Elastic, because you’ll always find some innovation, design or usability improvement to blog about there.

Amazon sometimes attracts more reviews than customers want to read. So Amazon provides tools to filter reviews by star rating and displays the “most helpful” positive and negative review as determined by Amazon’s community.

Plus, you can also search reviews by keyword.

Which is helpful, because you don’t want to buy a product that sucks unless it’s a vacuum or a Flowbee.

Colors are search modifiers that can bring a lot of long-tail traffic. When someone searches for a particular product and color, it often indicates someone is close to a purchase, or at least further along the sale-trail than one who goes broad.

But you can’t create a separate product page and URL for each color because that’s duplicate content, and duplicate content is the worst of sins, right? That’s what I thought until I started testing it - and it turned everything my momma ever told me about duplicate content on its head.

(If your momma never had “the talk” with you - you know, *content reproduction,* we recently did a duplicate content post that included a PG13 explanation. I made sure this post was completely different so nobody mistakes it for duplicate content).

Yes, Virginia There Is A Santa Clause…And You Can Optimize Product Pages for Color

Here’s an example:

Jessica Bennett Shoes sells its product through its own e-store and various retailers like Amazon, Zappos and ShoeBuy. One of its styles is called “Harli.” It’s made from burlap and comes in navy, beige and brown.

Shoebuy.com has 3 indexed product pages for Harli – one for each color.

Each page has an identical meta description, and according to Webconfs’ Similar Page Checker, these pages are 100% identical.

But Shoebuy not only owns top spot for each color, Google’s also throwing in some indented result love. When you search for “jessica bennett harli navy” (at time of writing and from my data center):

Top ranking… and for “jessica bennett harli brown”:

“jessica bennet harli beige”:

The only differentiators between the 3 color pages are the URLs (just numbers, no keywords) and the title tag. I’ve scoped out other sites that use different pages for different colors and they all seem to rank fine when color is included in the search query. The technique seems to be create color-specific pages in addition to one main product page (hence, indented results). Since all pages are indexed, the color pages are selected to appear when someone searches for the color, with the non-color, main product page potentially appearing as an indented, second result.

This leads me to believe that as long as your color pages are getting indexed, you don’t need to worry about duplicate content smackdown.

A few weeks ago I sat on a social media panel at Vancouver’s Massive Technology Show. Little did I know that the social media expert sitting to my left was also a talented cartoonist. I recently discovered Social Signal’s Noise to Signal comic series, and wanted to share my Top Eleven with you. I highly suggest you sign up for the feed if you like what you see:

Blog King

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Well here we are with another link roundup to keep you glued to your monitors all weekend. You know, I hardly feel like I should ever be linking to these blogs at all from Blogger’s Digest. Because you should be subscribed to it and getting the goods the day they’re published, not waiting for Friday! Nevertheless, I will continue to include them for the benefit of our new subscribers and because I want Google to know how great this content is.

• The toughest part is choosing one or two articles from GrokDotCom to link to. But this week I’ve chosen “How to Increase Your Cart Abandonment Rate.” I’ll spoil the ending for you - tease your customer with low or reasonable prices and save the “sticker shock” for checkout.

• How can personalization improve your ROI on PPC? Get the 411 from Sitebrand with Smart, Not More Keyword Spend Boosts Conversion and the companion case study (warning: link is PDF file).

• Ayat Shukairy caught a whiff of a bad search scent when searching for Dora the Explorer merchandise. Follow your nose to some definite search marketing and landing page don’ts with My Search Smells Fishy. PS, subscribe to the Invesp blog’s feed, you’ll get great content on a regular basis and a freebie you’ll really Digg.

• Attention Wordpressers! Many of us have been hacked recently (Get Elastic has suffered twice) - here are two great articles on how to avoid being hacked and how to recover, from Search Engine People and Daily Blog Tips.

• Justing Palmer interviews Aaron Wall, who literally wrote the book on SEO about what else? Ecommerce SEO.

• The SEOmozzers struck it Digg with Google Search Results Missing from One Box - a hilarious what-if of search results Google should really consider.

While in London this week, Jason Billingsley spotted something different in Google search results.

If you look closely, you’ll notice the display URL in Adwords ads are above the ad copy, not below. Ad copy also appears on the same line as the display URL in some cases.

I did a quick search in Google Blogs (search within only blogs) to see if anyone has blogged about this yet or may know what’s going on. Over here in Vancouver, I still see the traditional ad display so all I can do is speculate that Google is shakin’ things up and testing the impact of different ad structure.

Jason also observed that the text appears larger than usual which indicates Google may be testing out new formatting of not only paid search but also organic.

Of course it could be handywork of an internal prankster at Google, or the equivalent to Jason’s computer trying to drive on the opposite side of the road while across the pond. (PS, if you’re wondering what the stars are, that’s a feature of StumbleUpon - you can see which pages have been reviewed and rated by Stumblers, and if one of your friends gave it a “thumb,” that will show up too.)

Anyone have more information on this?

This isn’t a new topic here at Get Elastic, but since search engine optimization is such a key part to ecommerce success I’m going to bang the same drum once again on optimizing for brand names.

Zappos appears to have covered all the bases and then some in optimizing its brand category pages. For example, its Nine West page (below) includes 272 occurrences of “Nine West” on this page - that’s 4.55% of the entire page copy. This is what is referred to as “keyword density.” Though keyword density is not as important to SEO as was once thought (title tag, keyword rich backlinks from other sites and the domain’s overall authority have more impact), this page certainly is considered highly relevant to “Nine West” by Google.

Like Karmaloop, Zappos includes a paragraph about the brand itself. Most ecommerce sites have category / brand pages that consist of little more than images, links and a page title.

Also included at the category level are customer reviews. Each product with a review appears on the same page. Though the links to the product pages are “nofollowed” (link includes an HTML attribute telling search engines not to crawl the linked page or pass Page Rank), the keywords count towards the overall relevance to the page.

Get you’re scrolling finger ready, you’ll need it.

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Today is Earth Day, and for weeks online retailers have been jumping on the green wagon in their marketing efforts, taking advantage of their eco-friendly and sustainable products and projects.

More than ever, retailers are adopting a Wayne Gretzky “skate to where the puck is” marketing strategy. As consumers become more conscious of environmental issues, more and more marketing messages will contain green references and themes. Many feel that encouraging people to consume more in celebration of Earth Day is a bit ironic and counter-productive. But the shift towards eco-friendliness has encouraged many companies to source and sell green products in response to consumer demand. So getting the word out about the availability of green alternatives is especially fitting for this time of year.

The following is a sampling of Earth Day emails and on-site promotions from some of the top online retailers. You can read more about Earth Day email trends at RetailEmail.Blogspot.com, and more about holiday and event marketing from our Holiday Marketing Webinar.

EvoGear

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Bryan Eisenberg recently wrote a great post on email conversion that included some tips for avoiding spam filters from Yasifur Rahman.

I noticed that a Musician’s Friend email got trapped in my Spam box in Gmail, so I referred back to this post to see if I could diagnose how the email got flagged as spam. I found a few items that might have caused the delivery failure based on the article’s tips, plus a few other borderline-spammy red flags.

Diagnosing the Problem

Here is the Musician’s Friend email with images off (Firefox):

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Scott Wilson from the Cart Blog recently interviewed Elastic Path’s VP of Innovation. We don’t talk about it much here on Get Elastic, but we’re actually an ecommerce software company (that is also hiring). Jason answers questions about Java, entry-level ecommerce solutions and open source ecommerce software.

Scott, AKA “That Software Guy” is a Zen Cart master who blogs about ecommerce topics when he’s not busy with his client projects and side gig at Nielsen Media Research. Do “check out” the Cart Blog.

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger declared Tuesday Blogger Appreciation Day, and many thanks to Robert from GrokDotCom for including me and Jason on his faves list. I didn’t get a chance to post a comparable list here on Get Elastic, but we did do a post a while back that lists ecommerce bloggers and resources.

We also recovered this week from some Wordpress glitches that resulted in our About page disappearing and then appearing in your RSS feed. My apologies, we weren’t trying to self promote here. But I did receive several new Twitter and Facebook friends as a result and it truly is great to put faces and names to subscribers. Check out the About page to connect with Jason and me through social networks.

• EtailDetail asks: Will New York Sales Tax Legislation Kill Ecommerce?

• Should a Website Show Its Precious Algorithm takes a look under the hood of Amazon, Last.fm and StumbleUpon’s recommendations algorithms and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of giving users clues into how recommendations are made.

• Every online retailer wants to recover abandoned shopping carts - and as many as possible. Eric Leuenberger shares some of his own testing and findings that it’s best to send recovery emails 2-4 hours after the cart is abandoned (provided you captured an email address, of course.)

• An interesting news item on Zappos’ business strategy including its new product categories, and its strategy to have no sale items on Zappos.com, rather to use its acquired 6PM.com brand to sell sale items.

• How do you craft the BEST product name for your shopping engine feeds? Love Your Feed gives you the goods.

• And don’t forget the SEO benefits of data feed optimization.