Is it possible to "undo" canonical tags as unique content is created?
-
We will soon be launching an education site that teaches people how to drive (not really the topic, but it will do). We plan on being content rich and have plans to expand into several "schools" of driving. Currently, content falls into a number of categories, for example rules of the road, shifting gears, safety, etc. We are going to group content into general categories that apply broadly, and then into "schools" where the content is meant to be consumed in a specific order.
So, for example, some URLs in general categories may be:
Then, schools will be available for specific types of vehicles. For example,
We will provide lessons at the school level, and in the general categories. This is where it gets tricky. If people are looking for general content, then we want them to find pages in the general categories (for example, drivingschool.com/rules-of-the-road/traffic-signs). However, we have very similar content within each of the schools (for example, drivingschool.com/motorbikes/rules-of-the-road/traffic-signs).
As you could imagine, sometimes the content is very unique between the various schools and the general category (such as in shifting), but often it is very similar or even nearly duplicate (as in the example above). The problem is that in the schools we want to say at the end of the lesson, "after this lesson, take the next lesson about speed limits for motorcycles" so there is a very logical click-path through the school. Unfortunately this creates potential duplicate content issues.
The best solution I've come up with is to include a canonical tag (pointing to the general version of the page) whenever there is content that is virtually identical. There will be cases though where we adjust the content "down the road" to be more unique and more specific for the school. At that time we'd want to remove the canonical tag.
So two questions:
- Does anyone have any better ideas of how to handle this duplicate content?
- If we implement canonical tags now, and in 6 months update content to be more school-specific, will "undoing" the canonical tag (and even adding a self-referential tag) work for SEO?
I really hope someone has some insight into this!
Many thanks (in advance).
-
I'd agree with Sanket on (1) - while, not a huge fan of creating new URLs for near duplicates (there may be some other ways, like dynamically modifying the content), canonical tags are definitely your best bet here if you need those unique URLs.
I'll add a caveat on (2), though. Sometimes, canonical tags can "stick" a bit longer than you'd like, and Google may not re-index quickly. Adding a self-referential canonical tag does seem to help, anecdotally. What I'd also do is put those URLs back in your XML sitemap once they're unique (I'd leave them out while they're duplicates) - that can spur Google to reindex, and the self-referential tag can tell them to cancel the previous directive. Otherwise, they sometimes act like the old canonical is still in place.
-
Hi Jessica,
1. Implementation on canonical tag is the best solution in your case
2. Google doesn't index URLs in which you have implemented canonical tag, so I don't think you have to worry about it. After six month when you remove canonical tag I think you will get little boost in ranking as you have updated the page with unique content.
Hope this help you out...
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
-
Where to Place Quality Content in Order to Create Links?
Assuming we have retained a an award winning journalist to write articles/blog posts about our business. Assuming the content is useful and engaging. Where would be the best place to publish it to create high quality backlinks? 1. Our website blog
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Social media sites like our LinkedIn or Facebook pages.
3. Sending completed articles to websites that might potentially have an interest in publishing them.
4. Publishing the articles on our website and then promoting them with Adwords and Facebook to demographics that would find them interesting and link to them.
5. Combination of publishing an article on our website and posting a related article on social media and linking it back to the original article on our website.
6. Place a custom written article of extremely high quality on affiliate website run by the HOTH or a competitor. But before publishing check the affiliate website on AHREFS and Link Research Tools to ensure that the metrics are not at all spammy (decent domain rating). Which of the above options (or combination of) would most likely result in backlinks of good quality? Assume the quality of the writing is excellent. If pitching the content to other websites (#3) would work, how would we identify these websites? Thanks,
Alan0 -
Is Canonical Tags a Good Option With 2 Similar Sites?
I have an existing ecommerce site, on a Yahoo platform. I have recently started a different site on the Magento platform with substantially/almost entirely the same products and categories. For various reasons, I won't be ready to do a 301 redirect to the new domain for about another 8 months. I have 4 questions: Is it a good idea to use canonical tags in the meantime? Is there a way to know if the is cannibalization between the sites? They rank for different keywords. Will I lose all traffic and rankings for the Yahoo site if I go the canonical route? If I remove the canonical tags at a later point, will the ranking and traffic of the Yahoo site come back? Thanks in advance for your advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_Hatanian0 -
Changing Canonical Tags on Indexed Pages that are Ranking Well
Hi Guys, I recently rolled out a domain wide canonical tag change. Previously the website had canonical tags without the www, however the website was setup to redirect to www on page load. I noticed that the site competitors were all using www and as far as I understand www versus non www, it's based on preference. In order to keep things consistent, I changed the canonical tag to include the www. Will the site drop in rankings? Especially if the pages are starting to rank quite well. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QuickToImpress0 -
URL Parameters as a single solution vs Canonical tags
Hi all, We are running a classifieds platform in Spain (mercadonline.es) that has a lot of duplicate content. The majority of our duplicate content consists of URL's that contain site parameters. In other words, they are the result of multiple pages within the same subcategory, that are sorted by different field names like price and type of ad. I believe if I assign the correct group of url's to each parameter in Google webmastertools then a lot these duplicate issues will be resolved. Still a few questions remain: Once I set f.ex. the 'page' parameter and i choose 'paginates' as a behaviour, will I let Googlebot decide whether to index these pages or do i set them to 'no'? Since I told Google Webmaster what type of URL's contain this parameter, it will know that these are relevant pages, yet not always completely different in content. Other url's that contain 'sortby' don't differ in content at all so i set these to 'sorting' as behaviour and set them to 'no' for google crawling. What parameter can I use to assign this to 'search' I.e. the parameter that causes the URL's to contain an internal search string. Since this search parameter changes all the time depending on the user input, how can I choose the best one. I think I need 'specifies'? Do I still need to assign canonical tags for all of these url's after this process or is setting parameters in my case an alternative solution to this problem? I can send examples of the duplicates. But most of them contain 'page', 'descending' 'sort by' etc values. Thank you for your help. Ivor
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Risk Using "Nofollow" tag
I have a lot of categories (like e-commerce sites) and many have page 1 - 50 for each category (view all not possible). Lots of the content on these pages are present across the web on other websites (duplicate stuff). I have added quality unique content to page 1 and added "noindex, follow" to page 2-50 and rel=next prev tags to the pages. Questions: By including the "follow" part, Google will read content and links on pages 2-50 and they may think "we have seen this stuff across the web….low quality content and though we see a noindex tag, we will consider even page 1 thin content, because we are able to read pages 2-50 and see the thin content." So even though I have "noindex, follow" the 'follow' part causes the issue (in that Google feels it is a lot of low quality content) - is this possible and if I had added "nofollow" instead that may solve the issue and page 1 would increase chance of looking more unique? Why don't I add "noindex, nofollow" to page 2 - 50? In this way I ensure Google does not read the content on page 2 - 50 and my site may come across as more unique than if it had the "follow" tag. I do understand that in such case (with nofollow tag on page 2-50) there is no link juice flowing from pages 2 - 50 to the main pages (assuming there are breadcrumbs or other links to the indexed pages), but I consider this minimal value from an SEO perspective. I have heard using "follow" is generally lower risk than "nofollow" - does this mean a website with a lot of "noindex, nofollow" tags may hurt the indexed pages because it comes across as a site Google can't trust since 95% of pages have such "noindex, nofollow" tag? I would like to understand what "risk" factors there may be. thank you very much
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Where the "fudge-nuggets" are my internal links?
Ok, so... Google Webmaster Tools Internal Links are not showing any links to my site's homepage. I only link to the homepage by wrapping the logo with the link throughout the site. Does Google need these to be text links to show them? [/](<a class=)" title="Kona Coffee">![](<a class=)http://1s93mbet6ccj5zkm31703gqj8.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/kona-coffee-1.png" alt="Kona Coffee"/> Site is here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AhlerManagement
http://goo.gl/4C8GKc Could CDN image source be affecting it? Lost... please help!0 -
Reinforcing Rel Canonical? (Fixing Duplicate Content)
Hi Mozzers, We're having trouble with duplicate content between two sites, so we're looking to add some oomph to the rel canonical link elements we put on one of our sites pointing towards the other to help speed up the process and give Google a bigger hint. Would adding a hyperlink on the "copying" website pointing towards the "original" website speed this process up? Would we get in trouble if added about 80,000 links (1 on each product page) with a link to the matching product on the other site? For example, we could use text like "Buy XY product on Other Brand Name and receive 10% off!"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Do "NoFollow" links provide any SEO value?
Do "nofollow" links provide any SEO value, particularly for Google? I have heard that they still can, since Google doesn't necessarily follow all of the tags. Is this true? Is there any value in obtaining nofollow links? Can they also hurt in any way? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold
Afshin Apples of Gold0