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
-
Related products & SEO
My company has a comprehensive set of historical images and text - hosted separately on a free museum site - it's currently displayed on our main site as an iframe. I realize the iframe brings no SEO juice to the site - but we are updating our site - and thinking of bringing the images and text to our site. I'm wondering if this could help or hurt us - the historical information is about "boat widgets" and we sell "car widgets" - could a lot of information about "boat widgets" dilute our "car widgets" seo ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
Product Pages not indexed by Google
We built a website for a jewelry company some years ago, and they've recently asked for a meeting and one of the points on the agenda will be why their products pages have not been indexed. Example: http://rocks.ie/details/Infinity-Ring/7170/ I've taken a look but I can't see anything obvious that is stopping pages like the above from being indexed. It has a an 'index, follow all' tag along with a canonical tag. Am I missing something obvious here or is there any clear reason why product pages are not being indexed at all by Google? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Update I was told 'that each of the product pages on the full site have corresponding page on mobile. They are referred to each other via cannonical / alternate tags...could be an angle as to why product pages are not being indexed.'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieD910 -
Duplicate content on product pages
Hi, We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication. Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux2 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Rel Canonical attribute order
So the position of the attribute effect the rel canonical tags' ability to function? is the way I see it across multiple documents and websites. Having a discussion with someone in the office and there is a website with it set up as: Will that cause any problems? The website is inquestion still has both pages indexed within Google using the SITE:domain.com/product as well as SITE:domain.com/category/product
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
301 and Canonical - is using both counterproductive
A site lost a great deal of traffic in July, which appears to be from an algorithmic penalty, and hasn't recovered yet. It appears several updates were made to their system just before the drop in organic results. One of the issues noticed was that both uppercase and lowercase urls existed. Example urls are: www.domain.com/product123
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK717
www.domain.com/Product123 To clean this up, a 301 redirect was implemented a few months ago. Another issue found was that many product related urls had a parameter added to the url for a tracking purpose. To clean this up, the tracking parameters were removed from the system and a canonical tag was implemented as these pages were also found in Google's index. The tag forced a page such as www.domain.com/product123?ref=topnav to be picked up as www.domain.com/product123. So now, there is a 301 to address the upper and lowercase urls and a canonical tag to address the parameters from creating more unnecessary urls. A few questions here: -Is this redunant and can cause confusion to the serps to have both a canonical and 301 redirect on the same page? -Both the 301 and canonical tag were implemented several months ago, yet Google's index is still showing them. Do these have to be manually removed with GWT individually since they are not in a subfolder or directory? Looking forward to your opinions.0 -
301 redirect or rel=canonical
On my site, which I created with Joomla, there seems to be a lot of duplicated pages. I was wondering which would be better, 301 redirect or rel=canonical. On SeoMoz Pro "help" they suggest only the rel=canonical and dont mention 301 redirect. However, ive read many other say that 301 redirect should be the number one option. Also, does 301 redirect help solve the crawling errors, in other words, does it get rid of the errors of "duplicate page content?" Ive read that re-=canonical does not right? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
How to deal with category browsing and duplicate content
On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page. How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page? Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0