Rel=Canonical For Landing Pages
-
We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created.
We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale.
The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.
-
I'm with you on using rel=canonical but the new pages are slightly different in that they have a lot more content for SEO purposes. The content definitely provides value to users but wondering if the extra content means Google will ignore canonical tag? Google mentions that canonical is good for duplicates where pages are very similar if not identical.
-
So we're also planning on A/B testing the original PPC pages. There are going to be 2 control pages vs 1 test (original URL). There are about 12 control pages.
Normally I would use rel=canonical for landing pages if the control page was actually ranking organically which is the case now but we're going to block them from search results when the new organic pages roll out. I'm assuming no indexing the test variations would be the best direction to take?
-
Yes, this is exactly what's happening
-
Yes, they don't want to change URLs in all their marketing campaigns (offline, email, social media, etc)
-
Hi,
In my view add content in existing PPC page which is ranking in search results and ask PPC team to create a new landing page.
PPC campaign performance won't be derailed by having a new landing page
Hope it helps!!!
Thanks
-
The canonical option would be the route I went with in this scenario.
If you are going to noindex them, make sure that you audit the pages to see what links are pointing to the pages. If there is value them, canonicalization would be a better approach.
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
-
Rel: Canonical - checking advice provided by SEO agency
Hey all, We have two brands one bigger and one smaller that are on 2 different domains. We are wanting to repost some of the articles from the smaller brand to the bigger brand and what was a bit of curve ball, our SEO agency advised us NOT to put a rel: canonical on the reposted articles on the bigger brands site. This is counter to what i'm used to and just wanted to confirm with the gurus out there if this is good advice or bad advice. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
What should I do about not found pages?
I took over a site that had been hacked. A bunch of pages were created that said domain.com/cms/viagra. The pages are gone but they still show in webmaster tools as not being found, which is what I want. However, should I do anything besides leaving them as 404?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Rel=Canonical for filter pages
Hi folks, I have a bit of a dilemma that I'd appreciate some advice on. We'll just use the solid wood flooring of our website as an example in this case. We use the rel=canonical tag on the solid wood flooring listings pages where the listings get sorted alphabetically, by price etc.
Technical SEO | | LukeyB30
e.g. http://www.kensyard.co.uk/products/category/solid-wood-flooring/?orderBy=highestprice uses the canonical tag to point to http://www.kensyard.co.uk/products/category/solid-wood-flooring/ as the main page. However, we also uses filters on our site which allows users to filter their search by more specific product features e.g.
http://www.kensyard.co.uk/products/category/solid-wood-flooring/f/18mm/
http://www.kensyard.co.uk/products/category/solid-wood-flooring/f/natural-lacquered/ We don't use the canonical tag on these pages because they are great long-tail keyword targeted pages so I want them to rank for phrases like "18mm solid wood flooring". But, in not using the canonical tag, I'm finding google is getting confused and ranking the wrong page as the filters mean there is a huge number of possible URLs for a given list of products. For example, Google ranks this page for the phrase "18mm solid wood flooring" http://www.kensyard.co.uk/products/category/solid-wood-flooring/f/18mm,116mm/ This is no good. This is a combination of two filters and so the listings are very refined, so if someone types the above phrase into Google and lands on this page their first reaction will be "there are not many products here". Google should be ranking the page with only the 18mm filter applied: http://www.kensyard.co.uk/products/category/solid-wood-flooring/f/18mm How would you recommend I go about rectifying this situation?
Thanks, Luke0 -
Banned Page
I have been using a 3rd party checker on indexed pages in google. It has shown several banned pages. I type the page in and it comes up. But it is nowhere to be found for me to delete it. It is not in the wordpress pages. It also shows up in the duplicate content section in my campaigns in moz.com. I can find the page to delete it. If it is banned then I do not want to redirect it to the correct page. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Roots70 -
How do I fix issue regarding near duplicate pages on website associated to city OR local pages?
I am working on one e-commerce website where we have added 300+ pages to target different local cities in USA. We have added quite different paragraphs on 100+ pages to remove internal duplicate issue and save our website from Panda penalty. You can visit following page to know more about it. And, We have added unique paragraphs on few pages. But, I have big concerns with other elements which are available on page like Banner Gallery, Front Banner, Tool and few other attributes which are commonly available on each pages exclude 4 to 5 sentence paragraph. I have compiled one XML sitemap with all local pages and submitted to Google webmaster tools since 1st June 2013. But, I can see only 1 indexed page by Google on Google webmaster tools. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/US/Alabama/Vinyl-Banners http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/MO/Kansas-City/Vinyl-Banners and so on... Can anyone suggest me best solution for it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Rel=canonical overkill on duplicate content?
Our site has many different health centers - many of which contain duplicate content since there is topic crossover between health centers. I am using rel canonical to deal with this. My question is this: Is there a tipping point for duplicate content where Google might begin to penalize a site even if it has the rel canonical tags in place on cloned content? As an extreme example, a site could have 10 pieces of original content, but could then clone and organize this content in 5 different directories across the site each with a new url. This would ultimately result in the site having more "cloned" content than original content. Is this at all problematic even if the rel canonical is in place on all cloned content? Thanks in advance for any replies. Eric
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
Rel=canonical for similar (not exact) content?
Hi all, We have a software product and SEOMOZ tools are currently reporting duplicate content issues in the support section of the website. This is because we keep several versions of our documentation covering the current version and previous 3-4 versions as well. There is a fair amount of overlap in the documentation. When a new version comes out, we simply copy the documentation over, edit it as necessary to address changes and create new pages for the new functionality. This means there is probably an 80% or so overlap from one version to the next. We were previously blocking Google (using robots.txt) from accessing previous versions of the sofware documentation, but this is obviously not ideal from an SEO perspective. We're in the process of linking up all the old versions of the documenation to the newest version so we can use rel=canonical to point to the current version. However, the content isn't all exact duplicates. Will we be penalized by Google because we're using rel=canonical on pages that aren't actually exact duplicates? Thanks, Darren.
Technical SEO | | dgibbons0 -
Rel="canonical" for PFDs?
Hello there, We have a lot of PDFs that seem to end up on other websites. I was wondering if there was a way to make sure that our website gets the credit/authority as the original creator. Besides linking directly from the PDF copy to our pages, is anyone aware of strategy for letting Google know that we are the original publishers? I know search engines can index HTML versions of PDFs, so is there anyway to get them to index a rel="canonical" tag as well? Thoughts/Ideas?
Technical SEO | | Tektronix0