Use Canonical or Robots.txt for Map View URL without Backlink Potential

[khi5]

I have a Page X with lots of unique content. This page has a "Map view" option, which displays some of the info from Page X, but a lot is ommitted. Questions:

1. Should I add canonical even though Map View URL does not display a lot of info from Page X or adding to robots.txt or noindex, follow? I don't see any back links coming to Map View URL

2. Should Map View page have unique H1, title tag, meta des?

[ahmettanir]

Thank you!

Ahmet Çadırcı

[ecommercebc]

Sounds good! Glad to hear you got a solution sorted. Will be interested to hear how it goes.

[khi5]

thx for the feedback. I created a "/map/" folder in the URL and added to robots.txt. Again, they are simply a "Map view" option for users and has no or limited unique content, and no plans of changing that since the main page has all the unique content and indexed.

[ecommercebc]

Hi there,

Unless the pages contain a lot of crossover duplicate content, there's a good chance Google might ignore the canonical tag anyway:

"One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines."

Source

However, I wouldn't be able to make a strong case for noindexing the pages, unless you're sure they're not adding any value to users. Are these pages discovered by users in organic search (a landing pages report can help you isolate this)? If so, what's the user experience looking like? If users aren't finding their way to this page organically from search or direct (indicating they've bookmarked it), then you potentially could make a case for noindexing them. If they are reaching them as a landing page, you might want to think twice about noindexing.

An alternative would be to build out these pages more, so they standalone as unique, good quality content.