Rel=Canonical vs. No Index

[Leithmarketing]

Ok, this is a long winded one. We're going to spell out what we've seen, then give a few questions to answer below, so please bear with us!

We have websites with products listed on them and are looking for guidance on whether to use rel=canonical or some version of No Index for our filtered product listing pages. We work with a couple different website providers and have seen both strategies used.

Right now, one of our web providers uses No Index, No Follow tags and Moz alerted us to the high frequency of these tags. We want to make sure our internal linking structure is sound and we are worried that blocking these filtered pages is keeping our product pages from being as relevant as they could be. We've seen recommendations to use No Index, Follow tags instead, but our other web provider uses a different method altogether.

Another vendor uses a rel=canonical strategy which we've also seen when researching Nike and Amazon's sites. Because these are industry leading sites, we're wondering if we should get rid of the No Index tags completely and switch to the canonical strategy for our internal links. On that same provider's sites, we've found rel=canonical tags used after the first page of our product listings, and we've seen recommendations to use rel=prev and rel=next instead.

With all that being said, we have three questions:

1)Which strategy (rel=canonical vs. No Index) do you recommend as being optimal for website crawlers and boosting our site relevance?

2)If we should be using some version of No Index, should we use Follow or No Follow?

2)Depending on the product, we have multiple pages of products for each category. Should we use rel=prev & rel=next instead of rel=canonical among the pages after page one?

Thanks in advance!

[BlairKuhnen]

Oleg, I like your thought process on this.

I am dealing with this exact issue and have 2 brilliant minds arguing over what is best approach.  In reviewing the above, I agree with the approach.  Canonical links to the first page of "Honda-civic-coupe" makes perfect sense.

Total we use prev-next, but self-refer rel=canonical the URL's on subsequent pages, but are not no-indexing page 2+.  The negative impact is that Google will from time to time, add as site-links to the #1 search result a pagination page (e.g., 6 ) and some pagination pages are indexed.  Landing page traffic to these is near zero.  Our decision is determining whether to non-index or rel-canonical to the first page.

The pages in my case are new home communities where we might be listing all the different communities that are luxury communities in the specific city.  While they are all this same category, as a group can be described similarly, and will have near duplicate metas, each community (list element) is unique.  So, page #1 can be viewed as quite differentiated.

Here are the arguments:

1. Rel=canonical to the first page.  As much as we think each shingle (i.e., page of 15 communities) is unique. The 15 Descriptions, amenities, location, what it is near, things you can do there are unique,  As a group it can be considered just a list of communities.  By pointing back to page #1 we are saying this is a collecting list of 3 pages of luxury communities in a given city.  This will concentrate authority to the page that is most relevant.

2. No-index the subsequent pages.  When Google said near duplicate, they really were considering limiting that scope to pages where the items are exactly the same or nearly the same.  If the individual page content due to the differentiated product can be seen as unique content simply due to the in-page list elements, they are not really duplicate and rel=canonical is inappropriate.  To use rel=canonical would at some point be viewed as manipulative and over-reaching use of rel=canonical.  While this may cause this page to rank better, it may be considered not okay at some point.

Option #1 would seem to have a better immediate rank impact, but is there some real risk that it would be considered manipulative since the pages would not look to Google as near enough duplicates?

Glad to hear what you or others have to say.

[Leithmarketing]

Hey Oleg,

Thanks for the input - we'll look into making those updates!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yes, you would canonical to that searchnew.aspx page.

In this scenario, I would set up mod_rewrite to create "Category" page for each specific model so you can rank for more pages.

e.g /model/Honda-Civic-Coupe/ would be a static page and you can canonical all of the other filters to their respective pages.

[Leithmarketing]

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for the answers and advice - here's an example of a filtered inventory listings page on one of our sites that isn't currently using a rel=canonical on it. Would you just have the canonical point back to the main "searchnew" page? If you have any other insights to improvements to this page's structure, please feel free to send suggestions.

http://www.leithhonda.com/searchnew.aspx?model=Civic+Coupe

Thanks all!

[LesleyPaone]

I would say using rel canonical would be the best. I am guessing your filter system is using a anchor or a hashbang? We only do ecommerce work and we typically just have the canonical of the filter page pointed to the category that is being filtered. The reason being is that you don't want to reduce the chances of the category ranking in the serps.

But honestly like Oleg said, the site would need to be seen to give a 100% best possible answer. We have used several different strategies with our clients. Some involve actually rewriting the filter urls as landing pages and trying to rank them as well.

[Leithmarketing]

Hey Oleg,

Thanks for the response. We're actually looking for info on our product listings pages, or search results pages within the site. Would this advice still apply to those pages?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Hard to give answer without seeing the site... ideally, you don't use canonicals or noindex and instead have 1 page per product.

1. Canonical is better overall i'd say - as long as the two pages you are merging are (almost) identical

2. keep the follow, doesn't hurt and only boosts pages it links to

3. Again, tough to understand but sounds like you should use canonical (pagination basically "merges" the paginated pages into 1 long one so to speak, so if you have the same content over and over again, best to canonical)