Getting rid of duplicate content with rel=canonical

[RiceMedia]

This may sound like a stupid question, however it's important that I get this 100% straight.

A new client has nearly 6k duplicate page titles / descriptions.  To cut a long story short, this is mostly the same page (or rather a set of pages), however every time Google visits these pages they get a different URL.  Hence the astronomical number of duplicate page titles and descriptions.

Now the easiest way to fix this looks like canonical linking.  However, I want to be absolutely 100% sure that Google will then recognise that there is no duplicate content on the site.  Ideally I'd like to 301 but the developers say this isn't possible, so I'm really hoping the canonical will do the job.

Thanks.

[RiceMedia]

Thank you both, much appreciated.  Their rankings have suffered in the last two weeks and this coincides with their developers creating all this duplicate content - let's see if this fixes that issue!

Thanks again.

[iPhilo]

Hi mj1984,

The canonical tag is your only option here. The problem with duplicate content is really about control:

(i) Controlling Link Juice (past + future)

(ii) Controlling the targeted landing page within your campaign

Google will devalue certain identical pages, but they will always favour one. They do not, as far as I am aware, devalue all content that is duplicated (including the original) - So your concern isn't that your site is being devalued, simpliciter (often an immediate unwarranted concern). It is that Google will select one duplicate page and favour that above the others.

The canonical tag exists for you to control this.

So, will Google recognise there is no duplicate content?. It should, it might not, but I wouldn't worry about this. For the canonical tags that it does pick up (& eventually) - you can be confident that the page you want to rank, will be the one ranking.

[Theo-NL]

To me this sounds like a clear-cut case of a need for the canonical tag.