Canonical tag: how to deal with product variations in the music industry?
-
Hello here.
I own a music publishing company:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/
And we have several similar items which only difference is the instrument they have been written for.
For example, look at the two item pages below:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Canon2Vl.html
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Canon2Vla.html
They are the exact same piece of music, but written in a different way to target 2 different instrumental combinations. If it wasn't for the user reviews that can make those two similar pages different, Google could see that as duplicate content. Am I correct? And if so, how do you suggest to tackle such a possible problem? Via canonical tags? How?
To have a better idea of the magnitude of the problem, have a look at these search results on our site which give you product variations of basically the same piece of music, the only difference is in the targeted instruments:
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Canon+in+D
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Meditation
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Flight
And, similarly, we have collections of pieces targeting different instruments:
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Wedding+Collection
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Christmas+Collection
www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Halloween+Collection
Any thoughts and suggestions to tackle this potential page duplication issue are very welcome!
Thank you to anyone in advance.
-
Thank you, I think you clarified the problem very well.
Appreciated your help!
-
If you combine these topics you will have a loss of relevance for each of them individually..
The only way to avoid the loss is to write substantive and unique content for each keyword variant.
There is no way to get out of this work unless you give up and allow your site to suffer from the thin content and duplicate content.
-
Any ideas about what I just asked?
Thanks.
-
Well, what I am trying to understand is if consolidating 2 or more pages into a "main" page via canonical (in my case would be possibly 2 to hundreds of similar pages sharing the same piece of music for different instruments) will keep the same potential as having single indexed pages from a user search stand point.
I hope my question/concern makes sense... thanks!
-
This is not a simple question.
Keyword research, knowledge of how YOUR visitors search, and information about the content potential of your site should all be considered to arrive at an optimal decision.
Since I don't know much about your website, traffic, visitors and keywords I should not give poorly-considered advice.
-
Good point Danrawk, I am currently in a "thin content and duplicate content cleaning-up" phase of my website due to Panda issues, and I am getting rid (via noindex meta-tag) of thousands of very similar and thin content pages that may have hurt me (gradually, Google takes time to noindex pages), and I plan to keep just the best products and special items inside the index, but even by doing so I will end up having still similar pages due to the above "variations" issue, which in the long run could still give me trouble.
-
Yes, I think the best way to move for me, in the long term, will be to add unique contents to each page, but in the short term the Canonical tag could help to consolidate similar page.
I have an additional question though about using canonicals for this kind of music pieces:
If I have 3 versions of a piece named "Wedding Collection" like this:
1. Wedding Collection for violin and piano
2. Wedding Collection for cello and piano
3. Wedding Collection for guitar
And I consolidate all three pages with a canonical pointing to a main "Wedding Collection" page that lists those 3 different versions, what happens if someone search for "wedding collection for violin and piano"? Will I be able to rank for those specific keywords? And if so, what page will show-up in the index? Here is how the use of the canonical can become confusing to me... thanks for any further help!
-
Only thing i would be to add is to review your google webmaster account and seomoz spidering results to see if any of this is already showing up as duplicate. that way, you know for sure that you have a problem "right now". You're ahead of the game though in recognizing that the thin-ness of your product pages will cause an issue.
-
There are a few ways to solve this problem when you are offering very similar products.
-
Spend what it takes to write unique and substantive content for each product variant. I use this for my most important products, often writing over 1000 words and adding several photos and sometimes a video.
-
Combine similar products and offer them all on the same page. I do a lot of this with color, size, material variations.
-
Publish pages similar to what you currently have and risk a duplicate content problem. (this is called "take your chances with Panda)
-
Noindex similar pages or use rel=canonical to assign the duplicates to a single URL. I have a site with lots of pdf documents. All similar documents are offered via an image and a download button on the same page. The pdf documents are blocked from indexing and assigned to a single .html page using rel=canonical via htaccess. (I had a Panda problem on this site because of the many pdfs and their host pages. Rankings went down across the domain. After I noindexed pdfs and assigned each pdf to an html page with rel=canonical via htaccess my rankings came back in a few weeks)
-
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
-
Handling of product variations and colours in ecommerce
Hi, our site prams.net has 72.000 crawled and only 2500 indexed urls according to deep crawl mainly due to colour variations (each colour has its own urls now). We now created 1 page per product, eg http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini and noindexed all the other ones, which had a positive effect on our seo. http://www.prams.net/catalogsearch/result/?q=002.030.059.0 I might still hurt our crawl budget a lot that we have so many noindexed pages. The idea is now to redirect 301 all the colour pages to this main page and make them invisible. So google do not have to crawl them anymore, we included the variations in the product pages, so they should still be searchable for google and the user. Does this make sense or is there a better solution out there? Does anyone have an idea if this will likely have a big or a small impact? Thanks in advance. Dieter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Rel=prev/next and canonical tags on paginated pages?
Hi there, I'm using rel="prev" and rel="next" on paginated category pages. On 1st page I'm also setting a canonical tag, since that page happens to get hits to an URL with parameters. The site also uses mobile version of pages on a subdomain. Here's what markup the 1st desktop page has: Here's what markup the 2nd desktop page has: Here's what markup the 1st MOBILE page has: Here's what markup the 2nd MOBILE page has: Questions: 1. On desktop pages starting from page 2 to page X, if these pages get traffic to their versions with parameters, will I'll have duplicate issues or the canonical tag on 1st page makes me safe? 2. Should I use canonical tags on mobile pages starting from page 2 to page X? Are there any better solutions of avoiding duplicate content issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poiseo1 -
Canonical use when dynamically placing items on "all products" page
Hi all, We're trying to get our canonical situation straightened out. We have a section of our site with 100 product pages in it (in our case a city with hotels that we've reviewed), and we have a single page where we list them all out--an "all products" page called "all.html." However, because we have 100 and that's a lot for a user to see at once, we plan to first show only 50 on "all.html." When the user scrolls down to the bottom, we use AJAX to place another 50 on the page (these come from another page called "more.html" and are placed onto "all.html"). So, as you scroll down from the front end, you see "all.html" with 100 listings. We have other listings pages that are sorted and filtered subsets of this list with little or no unique content. Thus, we want to place a canonical on those pages. Question: Should the canonical point to "all.html"? Would spiders get confused, because they see that all.html is only half the listings? Is it dangerous to dynamically place content on a page that's used as a canonical? Is this a non-issue? Thanks, Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Bad use of the Rel="canonical" tag
Google is currently ranking my category page instead of our homepage for our key term and we would rather have our homepage rank for the term. Would it be a bad idea to rel="canonical" our category page to our homepage? Our homepage is optimized to rank for the keyword and has more PR than our category page. However, I don't really know if this will have negative repercussions. Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason_3420 -
Rel=Canonical - needed if part duplication?
Hi Im looking at a site with multiple products available in multiple languages. Some of the languages are not complete, so where the product description is not available in that language the new page, with its own url in the other languages may take the English version. However, this description is perhaps 200 words long only, and after the description are a host of other products displays within that category. So say for example we were selling glasses, there is a 200 word description about glasses (this is the part that is being copied across the languages) and then 10 products underneath that are translated. So the pages are somewhat different but this 200 word description is copied thru different versions of our site. Currently, the english version is not rel=canonical, would it be better to add the english version where we lack a description and do the canonical option or in fact better to leave it blank until we have a translated description? As its only part of the onpage wording, would this 200 word subsection cause us duplication issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Canonical Meta Tag
Can someone explain how this works and how necessary is it? For example, I have a new client, who is ranking WITHOUT the www in their domain, but they have a good deal of backlinks already that have www in it. When I set up google webmaster tools I made 2, one for WWW and one for WITHOUT and there are diffenet numbers of backlinks for each. I have no idea what do about this or if I should even do anything. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGrid0 -
No index, follow vs. canonical url
We have a site that consists almost entirely as a directory of videos. Example here: http://realtree.tv/channels/realtreeoutdoorsclassics We're trying to figure out the best way to handle pagination and utility features such as sort for most recent, most viewed, etc. We've been reading countless articles on this topic, but so far have been unable to determine what might be considered the industry standard. Two solutions seem to stand out... Using the canonical url on all the sorted and paginated pages. However, after reading many blog posts, it seems that you should NEVER use the canonical url to solve the issue of paginated, and thus duplicated content because the search bots will never crawl past the first page leaving many results not in the index. (We are considering ruling this method out.) Another solution seems to be using the meta tag for noindex, follow so that a search engine like Google will crawl your directory pages but not add them to the index themselves. All links are followed so content is crawled and any passing link juice remains unchanged. However, I did see a few articles skeptical of this solution as well saying that there are always better alternatives, or that there is no verification that search engines obey this meta tag. This has placed some doubt in our minds. I was hoping to get some expert advice on these methods as it would pertain to our site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0