Will rel=canonical work here?

[AkilarOffice]

Dear SEOMOZ groupies,

I manage several real estate sites for SEO which we have just taken over. After running the crawl on each I am find 1000's of errors relating to just a few points and wanted to find out either suggestion to fix or if the rel=canonical will resolve it as it is in bulk. Here are the problems...Every property has the following so the more adverts the more errors.

1. each page has a contact agent url. all of these create dup title and content

2. each advert has the same with printer friendly

3. each advert has same with as a favorites page

several other but I think you get the idea.

Help!!! .... suggestions overly welcome

Steve

[AkilarOffice]

Hi Thanks also as very much appreciated. The no 3 is just another url for a user to choose this page to add to a shortlist. Thanks again to you both.

[Dr-Pete]

I agree with Tom that rel=canonical should work here, but it does depend a bit on the scope and structure of the site. I might actually META NOINDEX the printable versions, as these are usually dead-ends and have no value to search visitors. I'm not entirely sure I understand what (3) is or why it's a separate page.

In general, though, you should get these under control, as it sounds like every advert basically has 4 different URLs. This could dilute your ranking ability and even cause Panda problems.

[AkilarOffice]

Hey Tom,

Thanks. One question, would it be best to take one of the urls for each prob point to be the target or or use the canonical on all?

Thanks

Steve

[TomRayner]

Hi Steve

I think implementing a canonical tag here is your best course of action, as you have rightly pointed out.

If you have different URL versions of the same page, like you might with the printer version of the pages, implementing the tag will stop Google from indexing any variants of the URL. Only one URL will be indexed and the dynamic URLs will eventually be deindexed.  That should solve that particular duplicate content problem.

If you have two different pages that need to exist, but they have similar content, you will need to add a canonical tag to one and add the same canonical tag to the other.  By that I mean the second, duplicate page needs to have its tag's URL point to the original.  Again, that should prevent it from being indexed.

More information on canonicalisation can be found with the SEOMoz canonical guide.

Hope this helps!