Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content
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I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other.
The domains are geo specific, so for example.
www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz,
and
www.page.fr with content xxx
is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?
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If Page.fr is in French, I'd use rel=alternate/hreflang and not the canonical tag. It should allow both versions to rank for the appropriate audience without causing issues with duplication:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
These aren't "true" duplicates and rel=canonical could disrupt the ranking ability of the French site.
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Yep, Mike's understanding is correct.
The two pages would be very similar, just one would be shorter.
page.fr is pretty much the same page as page.com, but in French and shorter
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Assuming I fully understand your question, here's an example as an explanation: If Page A has 2,000 words and Page B has 500 but the bulk of Page B's content appears in Page A, then Page B is a subset of Page A's superset and should have a canonical tag pointing to Page A.
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