Canonical questions
-
Hi,
We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories)
So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this;
Product 1 (landing page)
- Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) - BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page)
Product 2 (landing page)
- Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) - BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc
The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns.
As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content?
Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks! - Audi (model selection page)
-
No problem. Do share screenshots of product pages and the URLs (once available) here. Will be able to help you out with this. Fixing is using canonical or meta robots is not a time taking solution to implement in general and hence, can be fixed at the last moment (before going live) as well. So, this can be parked for now.
-
Thanks for that,
It could be an issue creating 'unique' content on every page as potentially there will be A LOT of pages (one for each major car make & model) but you might be right. I'll have a think and a chat with the dev team.
Thanks again.
-
Hi David,
Thanks for sharing a couple of instances to help me understand the point here. Well, I don't think there is any need of blocking these pages from indexing. You're confused about it just because you don't have much content to show on these pages and the templates is similar and hence, google might consider them as duplicate pages, right?
To resolve this issue and also, to make these pages stronger from organic visibility perspective, you would need to add on-page content and other "cool" features to make them powerful anyways. But, blocking them for bots won't be a good solution I believe.
Btw, if sharing the URLs of the pages is not possible as its in development phase, could you please share the screenshots of the pages here? Would be able to comment on how this should be handled once after having a look at it.
-
Thanks Nitin,
The site is in development so unfortunately I can't share a URL but I found a link that is not a million miles away from what we are doing, see below. My concern was because the bulk of the content on each page will be the same. Each page will be structure something like this:
Page Title
Car model detail (lets say Audi A4)Generic product information for 4 product types:
Product 1
Product 2
etcSomething like this:
http://www.carscovers.co.uk/AUDI-A4-ALLROAD-CAR-COVER-2008-ONWARDS.html
http://www.carscovers.co.uk/BMW-1-SERIES-COUPE-CABRIOLET-CAR-COVER-2004-ONWARDS.htmlAs you will see, the main content on each of the pages above is the same. (because the actual product is the same).
Does this help describe the potential issue?
-
Hi David,
If header and other details are different on these pages, why would you like to set canonical or somehow block these pages from indexing? That should be a candidate for duplicate content penalty I believe.
Could you please share some sample URLs to help me understand the issue you're talking about? I'll try my best to guide to handling this neatly from SEO perspective.
-
You welcome! Enjoy the rest of your day.
-
That does help, not sure how I missed that. Thanks Benjamin.
-
Hi David,
You might find this will help you. https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
Other than that, someone else may be able to answer your question in more detail if that helps.
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
-
301 Question - issue
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me. If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site. We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page. Why hasn't these pages been removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Internal Duplicate Content Question...
We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson091 -
Do I put a canonical tag on the page I am pointing to?
Lets say B i a duplicate page of A (main page). I understand I have to put canonical tag under B to point to A. Do I also put canonical tag under the main page A? Is it necessary? I understand that A would then tell Google that it is preferred page of A? Is this a correct understanding?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Brief question - SEOMOZ is teling me that i have duplicate content on the following two pages http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/ and http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/index.asp The default page for the /visas/ directory is index.asp - so it effectively the same page - but apparently SEOMOZ and more importantly Google, etc treat these as two different pages. I read about 301 redirects etc, but in this case there aren't two physical HTML pages - so how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | santiago230 -
Rel="canonical" questions?
On our site we have some similar pages for example in our parts page we have the link to all the electrical parts you can see here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical and we have a very similar page going from our accessories page to electrical here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical We are thinking about putting rel="canonical" from the accessories electrical page to the parts one. We would do this for several pages not just this one. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
Newbie question about long tail keywords
I am a little confused as to how search engines see and rank keywords. Let me explain. If I have a fairly long tail keyword such as "buy natural progesterone cream uk" will the search engine also break this up into smaller parts such as "buy natural progesterone uk"," buy progesterone cream uk", "natural progesterone uk" and so on or will it only see the words that are next to each other like "progesterone cream uk". Also where does cannibalization come into this? I really appreciate any help I can get with this that furthers my understanding. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mogsta220 -
Question about HTTP Vary for Mobile
I'm reviewing https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/redirects, and wondering where exactly to add HTTP Vary: Desktop request which has a mobile page to add “Vary: User-Agent” to the response HEADER Or if the request came from mobile device, than add “Vary: User-Agent” to the response HEADER
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Is having a canonical tag for the link that IS the canonical a negative thing?
Throughout our site, canonical tags have been added where needed. However, the canonical tags are also included for the canonical itself. For example, for www.askaquestion.com, the canonical tag has been added as www.askaquestion.com. Will this have a negative impact or does it not really matter whether there is such a loop?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0