Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
-
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site.
Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point)
It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages.
love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
-
There's no perfect solution, but Google's advice is to use rel=prev/next. This looks like pretty classic pagination. Rel-canonical is a stronger signal, but it's generally going to keep pages 2+ from ranking.
-
Dr. Pete,
I have a internal debate going and I was hoping you might be a tie breaker on rel=canonical vs noindex given these paginated pages and might be a good use case for others:
https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park
https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park/page-2
The individual list items are unique, but clearly want to rank for essentially the exact same terms. Page titles, metas, copy about cit is the same. Just the list elements are different, but not a 12 pack of pens, 24 pack etc. Is this tricky or clear?
-
Thank you Sir. I think we reached the same conclusion.
By the way, the it was a just a simple example of the page hierarchy - we're not doing Horror Books
-
I haven't heard any SEO recommendations or benefits regarding rel="contents". Rel=prev/next has mixed results, but I'd generally only use it for its specific use case of paginated content.
I guess you could treat V2 as "pages" within V1. If you did that, what you'd need to do is treat the main page as a "View All" page and link to it from each author page. I'm not sure if that's the best approach, but it's more or less Google-approved.
If the site has decent authority and we're only talking 100s of pages, I might let them all live in the index and see what happens. Let Google sort it out, and then decide if you're ok with the outcome. If the site is low authority and/or we're talking 1000s of pages, I might be more cautious.
It's hard to speak in generalities - it depends a lot on the quality of the site and nature of the pages, including how much that content is available/duplicated across the web. One problem here is that author pages with lists of books probably exist on many sites, so you have to differentiate yourself.
-
Good. Same page
I was looking in to rel=contents and those variations before, but I can't quite decide whether this is worth the effort or not.
e.g. There's a huge list of resources on a single page, segmented in to categories. The page is HUGE and takes ages to load, so I've been creating new pages for each segment and optimising those pages independently, but there is some common content with the primary page.
V1: Horror Novels page has a section for each author, each section lists all novels by that author.
V2: Each Author has a page which lists novels by that author, but links back to the Horror Novels page which is essentially an index of the Author pages. Would you also
Would you use rel=contents, rel=prev/next or a different approach in this case? From what I've read so far, there doesn't seem any "SEO value" in linking that way.
I guess we're trying to improve the UX through faster load times and segmenting the information in smaller chunks, but also presenting a number of pages to Google as a body of content rather than a single page without causing issues with duplicate or similar content - we just need to make sure that we're optimising it in the right way, of course.
-
I would Meta Noindex an "email this page" template. It has no value for SERPs, it's generally at the end of a path, and no one is going to link to it. Just keep it out of the index altogether.
-
Thanks Pete
So, for a more specific example, if an eCommerce store has an "email this product" page for each product (Magento seems to love doing this and creates a duplicate of the same email page for every product), would you recommend a canonical link for each of those pages to the main Contact page or canonically linking each page to each related product page?
From setup, I'd consider NoIndex on all of those pages anyway, but it's a bit late for that once a site has been live for years.
The email pages are obviously related to the product page, but the content there isn't anywhere near identical.
Or maybe there's a "more appropriate solution" that you alluded to?
-
To clarify, that's the official stance - rel=canonical should only be used on true duplicates (basically, URL variants of the same page). In practice, rel=canonical works perfectly well on near-duplicates, and sometimes even on wildly different pages, but the more different you get, the more caution you should exercise. If the pages are wildly different, it's likely there are more appropriate solutions.
-
Hey Pete
Can you explain, "you can't use rel=canonical on pages that aren't 100% duplicates" a little further please?
Do you mean that only duplicate pages should be canonicalised? Identical pages in two different sub-directories is fine, but two similar pages is not?
-
So, here's the problem - if you follow the official uses of our options, then there is no answer. You can't have thin content or Google will slap you with Panda (or, at the very least, devalue your rankings, you can't use rel=canonical on pages that aren't 100% duplicates, and you're not supposed to (according to Google) just NOINDEX content. The official advice is: "Let us sort it out, but if we don't sort it out, we'll smack you down."
I don't mean that to be critical of your comment, but I'm very frustrated with the official party line from Google. Practically speaking, I've found index control to be extremely effective even before Panda, and critical for big sites post-Panda. Sometimes, that means embracing imperfect solutions. The right tool for any situation can be complex (and it may be a combination of tools), but rel=canonical is powerful and often effective, in my experience.
-
It seems to me that for most ecommerce sites (myself included) that canonical is not the answer. If you have to many near identical products on your site it may be better to re evaluate what you have stocking and if you must stock them then the way forward is to make one page that properly explains them and allows purchase rather than many.
The only uses I can see for canonical is to consolidate old blogs and articles on similar topics. Using it to tidy an ecommerce site seems to be a misuse of the tool.
-
This can get tricky when you dive into the details, but I general agree with Takeshi and EGOL - consolidate or canonicalize. If the products are different brands/versions of a similar item, it's a bit trickier, but these variations do have a way of spinning out of control. In 2013, I think the down side of your index running wild is a lot higher than the up side of ranking for a couple more long-tail terms. It does depend a lot on your traffic, business model, etc., though. I'm not sure any of us can adequately advise you in the scope of a Q&A.
-
Also I forgot to mention that in this way you also don't have to worry about creating tons of different product descriptions because you will put one description for, let's say, 6 different products.
the way we built it, allow us to have just product group pages are reachable; the products pages are indexed and crawled and they have to be there otherwise the whole system wouldn't work, but no optimization is done on them and customers can't see it.
-
Hello there,
I manage an e-commerce site and because we have similar products and issues with duplicate content we have implemented product groups pages with a drop-down menu' listing the different options for a particular product and then we have used the rel="canonical" with the different product pages. In this way we have solved this issue and it works very well.
If you do implement it, make sure every passage is done correctly otherwise, as Matt Cutts says, you will have an headache trying to sort it out.
Hope it helps
-
Those pen offers are very very similar. Identical product descriptions except for perhaps number being sold or color or width of the tip.
If these were on my site they would all be on the same page. One page to concentrate/conserve the linkjuice. One page to make thicker content. One page to present all of the options to the customer at same time. (PITA to click between lots of pages to make up your mind as a shopper). One page to make maintenance easy.
-
Thanks
-
Yes, I've used this approach for a number of ecommerce clients, and it is very effective. There are many advantages to this approach:
- Eliminating duplicate/thin content across the site
- Focusing link value on a single page instead of spreading out across multiple products
- Less effort creating unique content (one page vs multiple)
- Potentially better user experience
Of course, if you have the resources to write unique content for each of your product pages, that is going to be a better solution. You can still create a landing page in this instance, you just wouldn't canonical the product pages to it.
-
Have you used this approach? If so how effective is it?
-
If you want to rank for "flat head screw driver", the canonical approach can still work. Simply create a landing page for flat head screw drivers, and include all of the flat head screwdriver products from each of the different brands. Then canonical each of the individual product pages up to the main landing page.
-
I have all the usual colour size attributes on my products. I just used that as a simple example. Its more to do with similar non branded products that are different enough to be "products" but not when I have 15 similar it's impossible to write fully different descriptions. Screwdrivers, screws or paint would have been a better example. There are hundreds of ranges like that. If you had five unimportant brands of screwdriver and you had flat head and philips head. Each one is marginally different (handle style etc) but there is no keyword benefit to having each optimised for say "flat head screwdriver". Having a good range is beneficial to the customer but seems to be detrimental to SEO. Is it better to employ writers to make every description different no matter how complex or should I canonical it?
-
Yes, that is a good solution, especially in this post-Panda world. Ideally you would just have one page for Bic pens, with a drop down from which you can select different options such as colors & size. If your shopping cart system doesn't allow you to do that, then the canonical is a good approach. This cuts down on the amount of duplicate content you have and the amount of unique content you need to create.
-
Have a client in the exact same situation. Check to see if you are currently getting traffic for terms that would be specific to having separate pages (e.g. "50 blue bic pens" versus a more general "bic blue pens"). If you don't, then you should canonical to one page. If you do, I'd keep it as is and work on diversifying the product pages more.
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
-
How to rank a product page
Hello, I have a product page and just did a little introduction ( 5 lines of text) but I have the feeling this is not enough for google. What is the solution ? Is it to increase the amount of content even though it is not going to be user friendly ? Or will google look at the product page I link too and take into account the content on those subpages to boost my "pillar / product page". Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Spammy page with canonical reference to my website
A potentially spammy website http://www.rofof.com/ has included a rel canonical tag pointing to my website. They've included the tag on thousands of pages on their website. Furthermore http://www.rofof.com/ appears to have backlinks from thousands of other low-value domains For example www.kazamiza.com/vb/kazamiza242122/, along with thousands of other pages on thousands of other domains all link to pages on rofof.com, and the pages they link to on rofof.com are all canonicalized to a page on my site. If Google does respect the canonical tag on rofof.com and treats it as part of my website then the thousands of spammy links that point to rofof.com could be considered as pointing to my website. I'm trying to contact the owner of www.rofof.com hoping to have the canonical tag removed from their website. In the meantime, I've disavowed the www.rofof.com, the site that has canonical tag. Will that have any effect though? Will disavow eliminate the effect of a rel canonical tag on the disavowed domain or does it only affect links on the disavowed website? If it only affects links then should I attempt to disavow all the pages that link to rofof.com? Thanks for reading. I really appreciate any insight you folks can offer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brucepomeroy2 -
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://moz.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Forum generating automatically extra pages. Can I solve it with canonical?
Hey there Webmasters of the Universe. So i have this problem with my forum. The platform I am using it automatically creates extra pages for every page. For exampleIf my forum had one page called forum.com/examplethe same page you can find at forum.com/example?page=1If I set rel canonical into the second one pointing to the first one will that cause a problem for me?Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
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 -
Quick Rel Canonical Link Juice Question
Let's say I have two duplicate pages, A and B. However, A has 5 external links and B has 3 _different _external links. If I add the rel canonical tag to B, so that A is the "master page" do I also lose whatever link juice was going to B from the 3 external links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content
I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other. The domains are geo specific, so for example. www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz, and www.page.fr with content xxx is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Where to point Rel = Canonical?
I have a client who is using the rel=canonical tag across their e-commerce site. Here is an example of how it is set up. URLs 1. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.do?nType=22. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.doThe canonical tag points to the second URL. Both pages are indexed by Google.The first page has a higher page authority (most of the internal site links go to the first URL) than the second one. Should the page with the highest authority be the one that the canonical tag points to? Is there a better way to handle these situations? Does any authority get passed through the tag?Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0