Canonicals: use when page has same listings, but displayed very differently?
-
Say you have a listing of movies. In that listing, there are 5 different view types. One has the scenes broken out. Another has only the box covers. Two of the views have movie descriptions, but others don't. Still, the listings themselves are the same, and you only want the default view to be indexed. Is it appropriate to use canonicals in this case?
The alternative is to noindex the other views, but the site already has rankings and deep links.
If Google does see the pages as unique and we apply a canonical, could we be penalized or would they merely ignore it?
-
Firstly you would never be penalized for using rel=canonical. If its the same content yes I recommend using the tag pointing towards the one you want indexed. It seems like a messy layout though have you looked into making it neat and maybe a bit more friendly for users, could you not have a lot of that information on one page ?
In short - Yes use canonical to avoid duplicate issues.
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
-
Putting rel=canonical tags on blogpost pointing to product pages
I came across an article mentioning this as a strategy for getting product pages (which are tough to get links for) some link equity. See #21: content flipping: https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies Has anyone done this? Seems like this isn't what the tag is meant for, and Google may see this as deceptive? Any thoughts? Jim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Hide and display iframes on different devices
I have an iframe on my website, I'd like to hide it when a user is browsing with a mobile device and display a different one for that user (which will be hidden on desktop). Is it possible that Google views it as cloaking? does it qualify as hidden content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OrendaLtd0 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Any experience with using programs to create UGC pages?
We have a new client (a mobile app) who created a program to create thousands of pages of "unique, user-generated content" for their website. An example: A person in the forum in app asks a question, and people respond. The client's program then compiles the question and responses into a unique, auto-generated page for the website. (I don't think the app is utilizing deep linking -- though I was going to recommend it -- so the app content is not indexed by search engines yet.) The pages are already created -- they are just not live on the site yet. I'm very skeptical. But the client says it's similar to what Stack Overflow does (or something like that). Basic example. Say that a question for which the client wants to rank is, "What Are the Symptoms of Cancer?" I'd think that a quality, human-created, referenced, well-written, authoritative page would obviously rank more highly than a UGC page based on a forum discussion on that topic. But of course, doing that for hundreds of questions is costly and hard to scale -- both of which are concerns of the client (a startup with little money). Has anyone had any experience in this? It's the first time I've tackled such an issue. Thanks in advance for any thoughts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamuelScott0 -
To list or not to list? Products that contain basic info only, yet show off product depth...
Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description... each item/category is it's own unique web page with basic info like Brand, Model, What it is, Price, & Quantity in stock. For searchers knowing what they want, they can quickly find us via the basic info & see that we have it in stock. But for someone surfing our site, it's not all that attractive or informative as you are scrolling down the category list. Collecting the picture & info can be a slow and time consuming process, but something we'd love to be all caught up on one day. Would it be wiser to take these pages off, or keep them on until they are fully updated with pic & more detail? (My thought is that even though they don't contain a lot of individual detail depth, they still add a substantial quantity of basic related content to the category page that they reside in. This basic info on these items are also given a chance to burn into the web search engines over a longer period of time. As time goes by and their content is improved, they will get re-crawled/re-indexed with their new information depth. Also, even though they don't look all that pretty, it shows off our product depth... if we only listed the items that looked spectacular, then a lot of our categories would only contain a wimpy 3 out of 30 items that we actually have for sale. That feels like a huge misrepresentation of how much selection we actually have to offer. But perhaps this is wrong thinking?) Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
Do I need to use canonical tags if I'm 301 redirecting pages?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
202 error page set in robots.txt versus using crawl-able 404 error
We currently have our error page set up as a 202 page that is unreachable by the search engines as it is currently in our robots.txt file. Should the current error page be a 404 error page and reachable by the search engines? Is there more value or is it a better practice to use 404 over a 202? We noticed in our Google Webmaster account we have a number of broken links pointing the site, but the 404 error page was not accessible. If you have any insight that would be great, if you have any questions please let me know. Thanks, VPSEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VPSEO0 -
Can I use the same source for two different websites?
I have developed a successful portal based website but would like to grow my portfolio of sites by expanding into new niches and sectors. I would like to use the same source code to fast track new sites but I'm not sure of the dangers involved. Content, meta details etc. will all be unique and the only similarity will be the html code. Another example of how I want to use this is that my current site targets the UK but I want to target a global market with a .com domain and this would involve using the same source. Is this possible without a penalty or am I overlooking something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0