Canonical, 301 or code a workaround?

[vforvinnie]

Hi,

Recently I've been trying to tackle an issue on one of my websites.  I have a site with around 400 products and 550 pages total.  I've been pruning some weaker pages and pages with shallow content, and it's been working really well.

My current issue is this:  There are about 20 store brands of 6 products on my site that each have their own page.  They are identical products just re-branded.  Writing content for each of these pages has been difficult, as it's a fairly dry product too.  So I have around 120 pages of dry content that is unique but not much different from one another.  I want to consolidate but I am not sure how yet.  Here is what I am thinking:

1. 301 - I pick one product page as the master, 301 all the other duplicate products to it and then make one page of great content that encompasses all of them.  If the 301 juice gets diluted over time I might miss out on some long tails, but I could also gain a lot more from a great content page with 500+ words of really good content as opposed to pages with 150-250 words of just so so content.

2. Canonical - Similar to above.  I pick a master page and canonical the other pages to it.  Then I could use the great content on all the pages, and still have pages for the specific products.  The pages might not show up in search engines but would still be searchable on my site.

3. Coded solution - In my CMS I could always make a workaround where the  products still appear on the brands page (just their name with a link to the product page) but all the links direct to a master page.

I realize all the solutions are fairly similar, although I am not sure which is ideal.  Option 3 is the most expensive/time consuming but it would drop my page total down to around 450 pages.  For a while now (dating back to before Panda) I've been trying to get rid of the low quality and outdated product pages so I could focus on the more popular and active pages.  Dropping my page total would also help in the SEO efforts as the sheer volume of pages that need links right now is high, and obviously the less pages I have the more time I can spend on each page (content and link building).

So what do you think?  Should I do any of the 3, a combination of the  3 or something different?

Cheers,

Vinnie

[vforvinnie]

Thanks for the quick reply.  The pages aren't identical.  I've managed to get 100-150 words of unique content for each but it's very dry and not great.  I could certainly do better, but not on each page, only one or two.

I think I like the 301 idea.  I 301 the pages, take the old ones down and bolster the content on the master page.

[marcelo-275398]

I agree with Steven, your best bet would be to canonical them all to the page with the best content.

[sferrino]

Without actually seeing the site I would say that if you have product pages that are identical to canonical them to one main place. If they are listed in the SERPS 301 them if you are removing them. Even having a few different words can still show up as duplicate.The last CMS option might work, but again without seeing the site it is hard to judge.

Since I do a lot of url rewriting I ran into a similar issue and did 301's and canonical to the pages I wanted to show and things are much better.