Canonical tag: how to deal with product variations in the music industry?
-
Hello here.
I own a music publishing company:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/
And we have several similar items which only difference is the instrument they have been written for.
For example, look at the two item pages below:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Canon2Vl.html
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Canon2Vla.html
They are the exact same piece of music, but written in a different way to target 2 different instrumental combinations. If it wasn't for the user reviews that can make those two similar pages different, Google could see that as duplicate content. Am I correct? And if so, how do you suggest to tackle such a possible problem? Via canonical tags? How?
To have a better idea of the magnitude of the problem, have a look at these search results on our site which give you product variations of basically the same piece of music, the only difference is in the targeted instruments:
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Canon+in+D
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Meditation
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Flight
And, similarly, we have collections of pieces targeting different instruments:
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Wedding+Collection
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Christmas+Collection
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Halloween+Collection
Any thoughts and suggestions to tackle this potential page duplication issue are very welcome!
Thank you to anyone in advance.
-
Thank you, I think you clarified the problem very well.
Appreciated your help!
-
If you combine these topics you will have a loss of relevance for each of them individually..
The only way to avoid the loss is to write substantive and unique content for each keyword variant.
There is no way to get out of this work unless you give up and allow your site to suffer from the thin content and duplicate content.
-
Any ideas about what I just asked?
Thanks.
-
Well, what I am trying to understand is if consolidating 2 or more pages into a "main" page via canonical (in my case would be possibly 2 to hundreds of similar pages sharing the same piece of music for different instruments) will keep the same potential as having single indexed pages from a user search stand point.
I hope my question/concern makes sense... thanks!
-
This is not a simple question.
Keyword research, knowledge of how YOUR visitors search, and information about the content potential of your site should all be considered to arrive at an optimal decision.
Since I don't know much about your website, traffic, visitors and keywords I should not give poorly-considered advice.
-
Good point Danrawk, I am currently in a "thin content and duplicate content cleaning-up" phase of my website due to Panda issues, and I am getting rid (via noindex meta-tag) of thousands of very similar and thin content pages that may have hurt me (gradually, Google takes time to noindex pages), and I plan to keep just the best products and special items inside the index, but even by doing so I will end up having still similar pages due to the above "variations" issue, which in the long run could still give me trouble.
-
Yes, I think the best way to move for me, in the long term, will be to add unique contents to each page, but in the short term the Canonical tag could help to consolidate similar page.
I have an additional question though about using canonicals for this kind of music pieces:
If I have 3 versions of a piece named "Wedding Collection" like this:
1. Wedding Collection for violin and piano
2. Wedding Collection for cello and piano
3. Wedding Collection for guitar
And I consolidate all three pages with a canonical pointing to a main "Wedding Collection" page that lists those 3 different versions, what happens if someone search for "wedding collection for violin and piano"? Will I be able to rank for those specific keywords? And if so, what page will show-up in the index? Here is how the use of the canonical can become confusing to me... thanks for any further help!
-
Only thing i would be to add is to review your google webmaster account and seomoz spidering results to see if any of this is already showing up as duplicate. that way, you know for sure that you have a problem "right now". You're ahead of the game though in recognizing that the thin-ness of your product pages will cause an issue.
-
There are a few ways to solve this problem when you are offering very similar products.
-
Spend what it takes to write unique and substantive content for each product variant. I use this for my most important products, often writing over 1000 words and adding several photos and sometimes a video.
-
Combine similar products and offer them all on the same page. I do a lot of this with color, size, material variations.
-
Publish pages similar to what you currently have and risk a duplicate content problem. (this is called "take your chances with Panda)
-
Noindex similar pages or use rel=canonical to assign the duplicates to a single URL. I have a site with lots of pdf documents. All similar documents are offered via an image and a download button on the same page. The pdf documents are blocked from indexing and assigned to a single .html page using rel=canonical via htaccess. (I had a Panda problem on this site because of the many pdfs and their host pages. Rankings went down across the domain. After I noindexed pdfs and assigned each pdf to an html page with rel=canonical via htaccess my rankings came back in a few weeks)
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Product Syndication and duplicate content
Hi, It's a duplicate content question. We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow. For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id. Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Does Bing support cross-domain canonical tag?
Hi folks, We are planning to implement a cross-domain canonical tag for a client and I'm looking for some information on bing supporting cross-domain canonical tag. Does anyone knows if there was a public announcement made by Bing or any representative about the support of this tag? Btw, the best info I've found is a Q&A here on Moz about it http://moz.com/community/q/does-bing-support-cross-domain-canonical-tags but I'm looking for a Bing information on the topic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Ecommerce: remove duplicate product pages or use rel=canonical
Say we have a white-widget that is in our white widget collection and also in our wedding widget collection. Currently, we have 3 different URLs for that product (white-widgets/white-widget and wedding-widgets/white-widget and all-widgets/white-widget).We are automatically generating a rel=canonical tag for those individual collection product pages that canonical the original product page (/all-widgets/white-widget). This guide says that is the structure Zappos uses and says "There is an elegance to this approach. However, I would re-visit it today in light of changes in the SEO world."
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore
I noticed that Zappos, and many other shops now actually just link back to the parent product page (e.g. If I am in wedding widget section and click on the widget, I go to all-products/white-widget instead of wedding-widgets/white-widget).So my question is:Should we even have these individual product URLs or just get rid of them altogether? My original thought was that it would help SEO for search term "white wedding widget" to have a product URL wedding-widget/white-widget but we won't even be taking advantage of that by using rel=canonical anyway.0 -
Bad use of the Rel="canonical" tag
Google is currently ranking my category page instead of our homepage for our key term and we would rather have our homepage rank for the term. Would it be a bad idea to rel="canonical" our category page to our homepage? Our homepage is optimized to rank for the keyword and has more PR than our category page. However, I don't really know if this will have negative repercussions. Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason_3420 -
Is it possible to "undo" canonical tags as unique content is created?
We will soon be launching an education site that teaches people how to drive (not really the topic, but it will do). We plan on being content rich and have plans to expand into several "schools" of driving. Currently, content falls into a number of categories, for example rules of the road, shifting gears, safety, etc. We are going to group content into general categories that apply broadly, and then into "schools" where the content is meant to be consumed in a specific order. So, for example, some URLs in general categories may be: drivingschool.com/safety drivingschool.com/rules-of-the-road drivingschool.com/shifting-gears etc. Then, schools will be available for specific types of vehicles. For example, drivingschool.com/cars drivingschool.com/motorbikes etc. We will provide lessons at the school level, and in the general categories. This is where it gets tricky. If people are looking for general content, then we want them to find pages in the general categories (for example, drivingschool.com/rules-of-the-road/traffic-signs). However, we have very similar content within each of the schools (for example, drivingschool.com/motorbikes/rules-of-the-road/traffic-signs). As you could imagine, sometimes the content is very unique between the various schools and the general category (such as in shifting), but often it is very similar or even nearly duplicate (as in the example above). The problem is that in the schools we want to say at the end of the lesson, "after this lesson, take the next lesson about speed limits for motorcycles" so there is a very logical click-path through the school. Unfortunately this creates potential duplicate content issues. The best solution I've come up with is to include a canonical tag (pointing to the general version of the page) whenever there is content that is virtually identical. There will be cases though where we adjust the content "down the road" 🙂 to be more unique and more specific for the school. At that time we'd want to remove the canonical tag. So two questions: Does anyone have any better ideas of how to handle this duplicate content? If we implement canonical tags now, and in 6 months update content to be more school-specific, will "undoing" the canonical tag (and even adding a self-referential tag) work for SEO? I really hope someone has some insight into this! Many thanks (in advance).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessicaB0 -
Hash as a Replacement for Absolute URL in Canonical Tags?
Any idea why companies like Skechers would be doing this: http://screencast.com/t/ooEkATGN7EX ? I suppose it makes sense, but I've never seen it done before. If this works, why on earth would we be using absolute URLs still?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman0 -
Rel Canonical Syntax
My IT department is getting ready to setup the rel canonical tag, finally. I took a look at the code on our test server and see that they are using a single quote in the tag syntax (see code block below). Should I be concerned? Will Google read those lines the same? <link rel='canonical' href='[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)' />VS. **versus** <link rel="canonical" href="[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)" />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0