Pages with similar content: Redirect or Canonical? Or something else?
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We have two pages on our site with similar content. One was originally a landing page for a marketing campaign, somewhat of a micro-site feel with a lot of content. We recently optimized another page on the site with much of the same content from the original landing page/micro-site. In order to avoid duplicate content, and to let Google know our authority page is the new page, we're wondering what is best practice:
Should we...
- 301 redirect the old page? No index the old page?
- Keep both pages and use a canonical to tell Google the new page is authority?
- Or something else?
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Either of these options is ok depending on the context, as Laura mentioned.
As always, if there's no real reason for both pages to exist then I'd suggest using a 301 to point that old page to the new one.
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It really depends on your rationale for having two different pages with mostly the same content. Ideally, you could remove the old page or merge the old with the new and 301-redirect the old URL to the new one.
On the other hand, I recognize that there may be a legitimate business case for keeping both pages. In that case, you would add the new URL within the rel=canonical tag to the old page. That tells the search engines that the new page is the one that should be indexed by search engines and come up in search results.
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