Should I use canonical tags on my site?

[edu-SEO]

I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc.

As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it.

Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order.

However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page.

Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that!

Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!

[Dr-Pete]

It's tough - on the one hand (especially pre-Panda), the geo-targeted content could help you rank. On the other hand, all those duplicates pose a real risk. These days, I think the risk is substantially greater than the reward. You could end up seeing the entire site devalued, even the non-geo pages.

Technically, Google could ignore the canonical tag if it thought the pages were actually different. You could use META NOINDEX instead, but here's my question - is it currently hurting you?

In other words, Google is ignoring the canonical in some cases and ranking those pages, but are your rankings overall doing ok? If they choose to ignore the tag, but that's not hurting you, I don't think I'd worry about it much. If you're seeing all the pages re-indexed and the duplicates are harming you again, then you may have to get more aggressive.

[X-com]

If it was my website i would remove the canonical tag and write specific text for each location on each service. Google clearly shows it's relevance on specific keywords. And based on your question these pages are important to your business. So yes, take them of, .. And write some good text on them, that converts well either! Good luck!