New ProductGroup markup

[Sergio Redondo]

Hi all!

With the new ProductGroup markup announced in Google's documentation, we have two options: single page and multipage.

What Google says:

Single page: 

• When the user selects a different variant on the page (using dropdowns for color and size), the image, price, and availability information change dynamically on the page without a page reload. The markup on the page doesn't change dynamically as the user selects different variants.

Multipage:

• ProductGroup doesn't have a canonical URL, as there isn't a single URL representing the ProductGroup.
• The ProductGroup on each page has a full definition of the variants on the page as well as a variant with only the url property to link to the variants on the other page, which helps Google find your variants.

I work with a store that presents the following situation:

A canonical URL for each product, for example https://onlinestore.com/awesome-product, that, at the same time, is one of the variants.

Each product has variants by size via parameters, for example https://onlinestore.com/awesome-product?item=1234 and https://onlinestore.com/awesome-product?item=1235.

The case is that when the user selects a variant, the page reloads, and that new URL with parameter loaded is canonicalised.

Then, which option is better in that case, single page or multipage?

Thanks in advance!

[jarnovandriel]

The 2 scenarios (single vs multi) can both work depending on a small detail - Is the canonical URL (without parameters) also available as a URL with parameters (just canonicalized)?

Because if so, than I'd choose the single-page scenario.

However, if the canonical URL is only available under that URL (and not with parameters as well), then I'd choose the multi-page. Although, in that case I'd likely try to convince the client to modify the site to a single-page variant as this saves a ton on crawl-budget (as Google will need to crawl less to get the full picture and keep it up to date).