Hi all

We've recently launched an eCommerce site selling Tea, Coffee, Machines etc built using Magento.

Those of you familiar with Magento (and other platforms I'm sure) will know about Simple & Configurable products.

We've launched utilising the Configurable functionality on the recommendation of SEO considerations (duplicate content, short tail search terms etc), but have found via User Testing that this is confusing some of our customers.

Let me give you an example - lets say someone is browsing for a tin of Coffee. Currently we have a tin of Nescafe available in sizes of 500g and 750g. The user clicks through to the configurable product and is asked to select their chosen size from a drop down. Initially they are presented with a 'From' price for the 500g, but should they choose 750g the price jumps up, causing frustration and confusion.

So we're now considering splitting the configurables (multiple product variations on one URL) into simples (individual products on individual URLs). So in our Nescafe scenario above, the 500g and 750g sizes would be on two separate URLs instead of the one.

Our SEO guys are concerned that this will dilute the click through rate, risk penalties with duplicate content (product descriptions) but also competing search terms / products within the same site.

My question is this - if a user searches for "Nescafe coffee" which product would Google return, the 500g or 750g? If we chose to put a canonical on the 500g, will we alienate users looking for other sizes? How do we choose?

A lot of big players seem to be using simples and as a Designer with an interest in UX I'm keen to go down this route also. It is however obviously imperative we consider the potential implications to SEO.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Does anyone know of a best practice way to solve this?

Any comments / feedback / suggestions / experience would be greatly appreciated :)