Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.

[mark_baird]

I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site.

Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point)

It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages.

love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.

[Dr-Pete]

There's no perfect solution, but Google's advice is to use rel=prev/next. This looks like pretty classic pagination. Rel-canonical is a stronger signal, but it's generally going to keep pages 2+ from ranking.

[BlairKuhnen]

Dr. Pete,

I have a internal debate going and I was hoping you might be a tie breaker on rel=canonical vs noindex given these paginated pages and might be a good use case for others:

https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park

https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park/page-2

The individual list items are unique, but clearly want to rank for essentially the exact same terms.  Page titles, metas, copy about cit is the same.  Just the list elements are different, but not a 12 pack of pens, 24 pack etc.  Is this tricky or clear?

[Mark-Tillison]

Thank you Sir. I think we reached the same conclusion.

By the way, the it was a just a simple example of the page hierarchy - we're not doing Horror Books

[Dr-Pete]

I haven't heard any SEO recommendations or benefits regarding rel="contents". Rel=prev/next has mixed results, but I'd generally only use it for its specific use case of paginated content.

I guess you could treat V2 as "pages" within V1. If you did that, what you'd need to do is treat the main page as a "View All" page and link to it from each author page. I'm not sure if that's the best approach, but it's more or less Google-approved.

If the site has decent authority and we're only talking 100s of pages, I might let them all live in the index and see what happens. Let Google sort it out, and then decide if you're ok with the outcome. If the site is low authority and/or we're talking 1000s of pages, I might be more cautious.

It's hard to speak in generalities - it depends a lot on the quality of the site and nature of the pages, including how much that content is available/duplicated across the web. One problem here is that author pages with lists of books probably exist on many sites, so you have to differentiate yourself.

[Mark-Tillison]

Good. Same page

I was looking in to rel=contents and those variations before, but I can't quite decide whether this is worth the effort or not.

e.g. There's a huge list of resources on a single page, segmented in to categories. The page is HUGE and takes ages to load, so I've been creating new pages for each segment and optimising those pages independently, but there is some common content with the primary page.

V1: Horror Novels page has a section for each author, each section lists all novels by that author.

V2: Each Author has a page which lists novels by that author, but links back to the Horror Novels page which is essentially an index of the Author pages. Would you also

Would you use rel=contents, rel=prev/next or a different approach in this case? From what I've read so far, there doesn't seem any "SEO value" in linking that way.

I guess we're trying to improve the UX through faster load times and segmenting the information in smaller chunks, but also presenting a number of pages to Google as a body of content rather than a single page without causing issues with duplicate or similar content - we just need to make sure that we're optimising it in the right way, of course.

[Dr-Pete]

I would Meta Noindex an "email this page" template. It has no value for SERPs, it's generally at the end of a path, and no one is going to link to it. Just keep it out of the index altogether.

[Mark-Tillison]

Thanks Pete

So, for a more specific example, if an eCommerce store has an "email this product" page for each product (Magento seems to love doing this and creates a duplicate of the same email page for every product), would you recommend a canonical link for each of those pages to the main Contact page or canonically linking each page to each related product page?

From setup, I'd consider NoIndex on all of those pages anyway, but it's a bit late for that once a site has been live for years.

The email pages are obviously related to the product page, but the content there isn't anywhere near identical.

Or maybe there's a "more appropriate solution" that you alluded to?

[Dr-Pete]

To clarify, that's the official stance - rel=canonical should only be used on true duplicates (basically, URL variants of the same page). In practice, rel=canonical works perfectly well on near-duplicates, and sometimes even on wildly different pages, but the more different you get, the more caution you should exercise. If the pages are wildly different, it's likely there are more appropriate solutions.

[Mark-Tillison]

Hey Pete

Can you explain, "you can't use rel=canonical on pages that aren't 100% duplicates" a little further please?

Do you mean that only duplicate pages should be canonicalised? Identical pages in two different sub-directories is fine, but two similar pages is not?

[Dr-Pete]

So, here's the problem - if you follow the official uses of our options, then there is no answer. You can't have thin content or Google will slap you with Panda (or, at the very least, devalue your rankings, you can't use rel=canonical on pages that aren't 100% duplicates, and you're not supposed to (according to Google) just NOINDEX content. The official advice is: "Let us sort it out, but if we don't sort it out, we'll smack you down."

I don't mean that to be critical of your comment, but I'm very frustrated with the official party line from Google. Practically speaking, I've found index control to be extremely effective even before Panda, and critical for big sites post-Panda. Sometimes, that means embracing imperfect solutions. The right tool for any situation can be complex (and it may be a combination of tools), but rel=canonical is powerful and often effective, in my experience.

[mark_baird]

It seems to me that for most ecommerce sites (myself included) that canonical is not the answer. If you have to many near identical products on your site it may be better to re evaluate what you have stocking and if you must stock them then the way forward is to make one page that properly explains them and allows purchase rather than many.

The only uses I can see for canonical is to consolidate old blogs and articles on similar topics. Using it to tidy an ecommerce site seems to be a misuse of the tool.

[Dr-Pete]

This can get tricky when you dive into the details, but I general agree with Takeshi and EGOL - consolidate or canonicalize. If the products are different brands/versions of a similar item, it's a bit trickier, but these variations do have a way of spinning out of control. In 2013, I think the down side of your index running wild is a lot higher than the up side of ranking for a couple more long-tail terms. It does depend a lot on your traffic, business model, etc., though. I'm not sure any of us can adequately advise you in the scope of a Q&A.

[PremioOscar]

Also I forgot to mention that in this way you also don't have to worry about creating tons of different product descriptions because you will put one description for, let's say, 6 different products.

the way we built it, allow us to have just product group pages are reachable; the products pages are indexed and crawled and they have to be there otherwise the whole system wouldn't work, but no optimization is done on them and customers can't see it.

[PremioOscar]

Hello there,

I manage an e-commerce site and because we have similar products and issues with duplicate content we have implemented product groups pages with a drop-down menu' listing the different options for a particular product and then we have used the rel="canonical" with the different product pages. In this way we have solved this issue and it works very well.

If you do implement it, make sure every passage is done correctly otherwise, as Matt Cutts says, you will have an headache trying to sort it out.

Hope it helps

[EGOL]

Those pen offers are very very similar.  Identical product descriptions except for perhaps number being sold or color or width of the tip.

If these were on my site they would all be on the same page.  One page to concentrate/conserve the linkjuice.  One page to make thicker content.   One page to present all of the options to the customer at same time.  (PITA to click between lots of pages to make up your mind as a shopper).   One page to make maintenance easy.

[mark_baird]

Thanks

[TakeshiYoung]

Yes, I've used this approach for a number of ecommerce clients, and it is very effective. There are many advantages to this approach:

• Eliminating duplicate/thin content across the site
• Focusing link value on a single page instead of spreading out across multiple products
• Less effort creating unique content (one page vs multiple)
• Potentially better user experience

Of course, if you have the resources to write unique content for each of your product pages, that is going to be a better solution. You can still create a landing page in this instance, you just wouldn't canonical the product pages to it.

[mark_baird]

Have you used this approach? If so how effective is it?

[TakeshiYoung]

If you want to rank for "flat head screw driver", the canonical approach can still work. Simply create a landing page for flat head screw drivers, and include all of the flat head screwdriver products from each of the different brands. Then canonical each of the individual product pages up to the main landing page.

[mark_baird]

I have all the usual colour size attributes on my products. I just used that as a simple example. Its more to do with similar non branded products that are different enough to be "products" but not when I have 15 similar it's impossible to write fully different descriptions. Screwdrivers, screws or paint would have been a better example. There are hundreds of ranges like that. If you had five unimportant brands of screwdriver and you had flat head and philips head. Each one is marginally different (handle style etc) but there is no keyword benefit to having each optimised for say "flat head screwdriver". Having a good range is beneficial to the customer but seems to be detrimental to SEO. Is it better to employ writers to make every description different no matter how complex or should I canonical it?

[TakeshiYoung]

Yes, that is a good solution, especially in this post-Panda world. Ideally you would just have one page for Bic pens, with a drop down from which you can select different options such as colors & size. If your shopping cart system doesn't allow you to do that, then the canonical is a good approach. This cuts down on the amount of duplicate content you have and the amount of unique content you need to create.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Have a client in the exact same situation. Check to see if you are currently getting traffic for terms that would be specific to having separate pages (e.g. "50 blue bic pens" versus a more general "bic blue pens"). If you don't, then you should canonical to one page. If you do, I'd keep it as is and work on diversifying the product pages more.