Using unique content from "rel=canonical"ized page
-
Hey everyone, I have a question about the following scenario:
Page 1: Text A, Text B, Text C
Page 2 (rel=canonical to Page 1): Text A, Text B, Text C, Text D
Much of the content on page 2 is "rel=canonical"ized to page 1 to signalize duplicate content. However, Page 2 also contains some unique text not found in Page 1.
How safe is it to use the unique content from Page 2 on a new page (Page 3) if the intention is to rank Page 3?
Does that make any sense?
-
Yeah, I tend to agree with Maximilian and Mike - I'm not clear on the use-case scenario here and, technically, pages 1 and 2 aren't duplicated. Rel=canonical probably will still work, in most cases, and will keep page 2 from looking like a duplicate (and from ranking), but I'd like to understand the situation better.
If Google did honor the canonical tag on page 2, then the duplication between pages 2 and 3 shouldn't be a problem. I'm just thinking there may be a better way.
-
Technically Page 1 would contain the subset of Page 2's superset except that Page 1 is likely older, ranking better and the page you want to keep so would take precedence. In which case Page 2's content would be considered as duplicating Page 1's superset of content and Page 2 should be canonicalized to Page 1. Of course, Rel=Canonical is a suggestion not a directive so the search engines reserve the right to not listen to it if they feel the tag isn't relevant.
The real question here would be why are you reusing all of that copy and would those pages be better served with more unique content instead of continuing to reuse and canonicalize?
-
Hey Mak,
One thing to bear in mind is that the canonical tag should be used on pages with the same content, if there is extra content on Page 2 that doesn't appear on Page 1, then Google could ignore the canonical tag al together:
_The
rel="canonical"attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).
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
-
When "pruning" old content, is it normal to see an drop in Domain Authority on Moz crawl report?
After reading several posts about the benefits of pruning old, irrelevant content, I went through a content audit exercise to kick off the year. The biggest category of changes so far has been to noindex + remove from sitemap a number of blog posts from 2015/2016 (which were very time-specific, i.e. software release details). I assigned many of the old posts a new canonical URL pointing to the parent category. I realize it'd be ideal to point to a more relevant/current blog post, but could this be where I've gone wrong? Another big change was to hide the old posts from the archive pages on the blog. Any advice/experience from anyone doing something similar much appreciated! Would be good to be reassured I'm on the right track and a slight drop is nothing to worry about. 🙂 If anyone is interested in having a look: https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots [this is the category where changes have been made, primarily] https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots/keyboard-shortcut-editing/ [example of a pruned post]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jonmc1 -
Best Practices for Creating Back Links from "Thought Leader" Content
What is the best way to use articles from a "thought leader" to build high-quality links to my website? I have heard that it is possible to pay bloggers to post business articles that link back to a website. That assuming these blogs have domain authority this is a good technique to improve ranking. Is this in fact true, and if so where would I find blogs to post our content. The purpose would be to promote real estate brokerage website. Any suggestions? Is this possible, advisable, best use of quality content? Alternatively, where else can we post engaging content to create links back to our site? Social media? The nature of the content would be such topics as how to find the best value in Manhattan office of loft space rentals, etcera. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Hreflang Tags & Canonicals Being Used
We have a site on which both hreflang tags and canonicals are being used. There are multiple languages, but for this I'll explain our problem using two. There are a ton of dupe page titles coming up in GSC, and we're not sure if we have an issue or not. First, the hreflang tags are implement properly. UK page pointing there, US page pointing there. Further down the page, there are canonical tags - except the UK canonical tag points to the UK page, and the US version points to the US page. I'm not sure if this will cause an issue in terms of SEO or indexing. Has anyone experienced this before or does anything have any insight into this? Thanks much! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Snaptech_Marketing0 -
Duplicate content on product pages
Hi, We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication. Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux2 -
Does Unique Content Need to be Located Higher on my webpages?
I have 1 page that ranks well with unique written content located high up on page (http://www.honoluluhi5.com/new-condos-in-honolulu/). I struggle to rank for 200+ other pages where unique content requires scrolling (ex: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu-homes/). I am thinking to do as follows: Change layout of all my pages to have unique content higher on page When users are on my site (not coming from search engines) and use my search filters, then users will land on pages where unique content is lower on page (so keep this layout: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu-homes/). I will then add these pages to my robots.txt file so they do not show in Google's index. Reason: unique content lower on page offers best user experience. With unique content higher on page, I expect bounce rate to increase about 10% (based on the 1 page I have with unique content higher), but I think it is worthwhile, as I am sure search engines will start having my pages rank higher.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
301 and Canonical - is using both counterproductive
A site lost a great deal of traffic in July, which appears to be from an algorithmic penalty, and hasn't recovered yet. It appears several updates were made to their system just before the drop in organic results. One of the issues noticed was that both uppercase and lowercase urls existed. Example urls are: www.domain.com/product123
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK717
www.domain.com/Product123 To clean this up, a 301 redirect was implemented a few months ago. Another issue found was that many product related urls had a parameter added to the url for a tracking purpose. To clean this up, the tracking parameters were removed from the system and a canonical tag was implemented as these pages were also found in Google's index. The tag forced a page such as www.domain.com/product123?ref=topnav to be picked up as www.domain.com/product123. So now, there is a 301 to address the upper and lowercase urls and a canonical tag to address the parameters from creating more unnecessary urls. A few questions here: -Is this redunant and can cause confusion to the serps to have both a canonical and 301 redirect on the same page? -Both the 301 and canonical tag were implemented several months ago, yet Google's index is still showing them. Do these have to be manually removed with GWT individually since they are not in a subfolder or directory? Looking forward to your opinions.0 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Content Marketing: Use of the words "guest post" in outreach email
Hello, I'm marketing a useful article in our niche, appealing to the humanitarian side of things and I always show I'm a reciprocator. Should my wording in my outreach email be: ...to write a guest post around this article: http://... Or should I just ask if they want help with content and go from there? In other words, should I always call it a guest post for maximum conversions? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0