Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content
-
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?
-
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.
-
-
-
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.
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
-
If I use content from DomainA on DomainB, but spread it - how do I implement the canoncial tag?
Hey community, I have a question regarding canonical tags.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ElliPirelli
I used the content of one of my domains (nameA.com/ContentA) and copied it to another domain, but on several pages: nameB.com/ContentA1
nameB.com/ContentA2
nameB.com/ContentA3
and so on). So I divided the content from domainA to several pages of domainB. The reason is, that my client wants to build a new business on domainB and wants to use the exact same content from domainA, because he can't afford another copywriter at the moment (and he doesn't want to rewrite it himself). Problem: DomainA is ranking for this content and he wants to keep the rankings, until domainB ranks similar (for the same keywords, of course). So my question is: Can I put a canonical tag on domainA?
My thoughts are: Not a single page of domainB is 100% duplicate content, as it's always only partialy the same. Can I just choose one of those pages from domainB to put as link-goal for the canonical tag? Or do I need to create a "view-all" page on domainB, with all the content put together, so it's 100% duplicate to domainA, and then put a canonical tag to domainA and link to this "view-all" page? If I do so, do I need to also put canonicals on every single page from domainB, to link to this "view-all" page?
IMPORTANT: Would the other pages of domainB then be ranked/listed in the SERRPs, or only the "view-all" site? I would really appreciate your help, as I have been seaching for answers to this specific problem since more than a week... Thank you! Best regards0 -
No Index thousands of thin content pages?
Hello all! I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc. The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd." These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders. Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street". Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd? What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages? Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them? Thanks for any input. Ken
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Should I put rel next and rel prev and canonical on tags pages
Hi I have a tag pages on a news website each tag page is divided to several pages, but Google does't crawled those pages because the links are in javaScript, I want to do the following things: Change the links to html href Add rel=pref rel=next Add a canonical in each page with the url of the main tag page Do you agree with my solution? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
How do we avoid duplicate/thin content on +150,000 product pages?
Hey guys! We got a rather large product range (books) on our eCommerce site (+150,000 titles). We get book descriptions as meta data from our publishers, which we display on the product pages. This obviously is not unique, as many other sites display the same piece of description of the book. It is important for us to rank on those book titles, so my question to You is: How would you go about it? I mean, it seems like a rather unrealistic task to paraphrase +150,000 (and growing) book descriptions. As I see it, there are these options: 1. Don't display the descriptions on the product pages (however then those pages will get even thinner!)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacob_Holm
2. Display the (duplicate) descriptions, but put no-index on those product pages in order not to punish the rest of the site (not really an option, though).
3. Hire student workers to produce unique product descriptions for all 150,000 products (seems like a huge and expensive task) But how would You solve such a challenge?
Thanks a lot! Cheers, Tommy.0 -
Blog tags are creating excessive duplicate content...should we use rel canonicals or 301 redirects?
We are having an issue with our cilent's blog creating excessive duplicate content via blog tags. The duplicate webpages from tags offer absolutely no value (we can't even see the tag). Should we just 301 redirect the tagged page or use a rel canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Wildcard Redirects & Canonical Tags
I have an interesting situation. Current URLs Example1: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NakulGoyal
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html Current URLs Example2: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789.html Current URLs Example3: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html New URL:
www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html I want to make sure all variations of the above URL redirect to the new URLs. However, as you see in Example 3, we are dealing with variables that are passed on. (+5 in this case). Question 1: What wildcard 301 redirect / regular expression can I use to tackle these ? Question 2: If we redirect www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html to www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html and www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html contains the canonical tag www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html, any concerns or red flags here ?0 -
Which index page should I canonical to?
Hello! I'm doing a routine clean up of my code and had a question about the canonical tag. On the index page, I have the following: I have never put any thought into which index path is the best to use. http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.php Could someone shed some light on this for me? Does it make a difference? Thanks! Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan_Phillips1 -
How does a canonical work and is it necessary to also have a no index, follow tag in place?
Across our site, we have canonical tags in place for URLs that contain duplicate content and for URLs without a trailing slash since we are using URLs WITH a trailing slash for all URLs across our site. We also recently added a no index, follow tag to all non-canonical URLs since we noticed a high number of duplicate content URLs in Google Webmaster Tools. The first part of my question is: How does a canonical work? Does the robot read the canonical and immediately go to the canonical URL or does it continue to read past the canonical tag and get to the no index, follow tag if there is one present? The second part of my question is: Is it necessary to have both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag in place? Or should the canonical tag be sufficient to avoid duplicate content? And lastly, if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order? Canonical tag first then no index, follow tag second or no index, follow tag first then canonical tag second? I would appreciate any insight you can give. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0