2 Similar Pages
-
Hello,
I have two very similar pages. The first page is an apartment rental page with a map, rental listings and some neighborhood data below. The neighborhood data includes useful info about the area with photos, text about the area, crime rates, avg. rental rates, etc. The second page is a neighbourhood guide that includes virtually the same data as the rental page, but in longer form ie. more photos, more text, etc.
I want the rental page to rank, while ranking the neighborhood page is not important as it would be used more for link bait. But since the information on the two pages is the same, I don't want them to compete with each other.
I'm thinking of putting a cannonical tag on the neighborhood page pointing back to the rental page. Is that the correct thing to do in this instance?
Thanks for your help.
J
-
The other question is how will the "link bait" page be found by potential linkers? It won't show up in search anymore, if you point a canonical to the other page. [Maybe it is just very easy to find from another popular page on your site, which is easily findable?]
-
Hi Jon,
Use of the canonical tag in this situation is just what it is intended for. Have a quick read of what Google says in these situations:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
- Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to
http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD
get consolidated with links tohttps://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html
.
While Google do say it is a recommendation, I find that in situations like this, it will work just fine for you. As David said, give it a go, but I can't see that you will have any problems. Google is pretty good at sorting these issues out, and especially so if you tell them which is your preferred page for ranking:
"While we encourage you to use any of these methods, none of them are required. If you don't indicate a canonical URL, we'll identify what we think is the best version or URL."
-Andy
- Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to
-
Hi Jon,
A canonical tag can be used as you described, but you may have issues in your case.
The issue is that search engines treat canonical tags as a recommendation, not a directive. Meaning that they can choose to ignore the canonical tag if they think it's not appropriate.
In your case, if the canonicalized (link bait) page is getting more external links than the other page, it could increase the chance of the canonical tag being ignored because search engines might see it as the better page.
I think it would be best to have a single, high-quality page, but if you absolutely must keep the pages separate, use the canonical tag and see how things go.
Cheers,
David
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
-
Page Hierarchy Question
I understand the basic concept of page hierarchy, i.e. parent and child pages. My question is: Should the home page be the parent of all 2nd-level pages? Can/should there only be one top-level page, the home page? In other words, is this: site.com/homesite.com/home/products site.com/home/products/widgetsite.com/home/aboutsite.com/home/contactbetter than this:site.com/homesite.com/products site.com/products/widgetsite.com/aboutsite.com/contactThanks for your opinion!
On-Page Optimization | | BillWoods0 -
Too many links per page? Double navigation on every page...
I have a client with navigation across the top of each page plus the same nav links in a sidebar on every page. Can that duplication (or the sheer number of links) on each page have a negative ranking factor?
On-Page Optimization | | brm20170 -
Home page cannibal
I was wondering if others had the same problem I have. It appears Google loves that home page too much and I'm having a difficult time getting it to rank the page I really want. And that happens if a keyword I want to rank for only appears on the home page one time with a keyword density of .1%. Take vanillaqueen.com for example. The home page ranks on the first page for "bulk vanilla beans" and not http://vanillaqueen.com/shop/category/vanilla-beans/ or http://vanillaqueen.com/five-reasons-why-buying-bulk-vanilla-makes-good-sense/ And I'll add another one that I recently took on. This is a personal injury attorney in a large city so there is a ton of competition who have been doing SEO for a very long time. (Fortunately he also does business and civil litigation law to keep the business going). Last month, according to webmaster tools, he got a couple of clicks (hey, it's something!) on "personal injury attorney [his city]" on page 2 in the SERPS, but it was his home page. http://bit.ly/1Gvumlm **In this case I don't mind people landing on the home page, but does the fact that another page that is much better optimized for those keywords indicate a penalty on that page? And is his rank lower because the better page is not ranking and Google has to find the next best thing in the home page? ** Has anyone else experienced that and what have you done to get Google to not go home? P.S. The law site is a huge challenge because of the competition. Any help you pros out there can offer to get this underdog out of hiding will be much appreciated. We're starting a smart, strategic content marketing plan now that I'm very excited about.
On-Page Optimization | | katandmouse1 -
Is it better to have an hreflang go to the home page in a different language if there's no corresponding page
If I have some pages in English, but not in Spanish on my website: Should my hreflang go to the home page on the Spanish site? Or should I not have an "es-MX" hreflang for that page? Ideally I would have all the pages translated, but this has not all been done yet.
On-Page Optimization | | RoxBrock0 -
Noindex child pages (whose content is included on parent pages)?
I'm sorry if there have been questions close to this before... I've using WordPress less like a blogging platform and more like a CMS for years now... For content management purposes we organize a lot of content around Parent/Child page (and custom-post-type) relationships; the Child pages are included as tabbed content on the Parent page. Should I be noindexing these child pages, since their content is already on the site, in full, on their Parent pages (ie. duplicate content)? Or does it not matter, since the crawlers may not go to all of the tabbed content? None of the pages have shown up in Moz's "High Priority Issues" as duplicate content but it still seems like I'm making the Parent pages suffer needlessly... Anything obvious I'm not taking into consideration? By the by, this is my first post here @ Moz, which I'm loving; this site and the forums are such a great resource! Anyways, thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | rsigg0 -
Repetition of Location on A Page
I was wondering if there was a certain number of times you had to repeat a location to help your page rank well. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | OOMDODigital0 -
2 canonical tags on the same page
When using the 'on-page optimizer' tool, I continue to get the same recommendation on every page to only use 1 canonical tag on the page. I'm not sure why there are 2 tags on each page in the first place so I don't know how to remove the one that's not needed. Our site is on a WP blog and a sample page to view the source code would be: http://www.shilohstreet.com/blog/is-flipping-houses-smart-real-estate-investing.html Does anyone know why this is happening, how to fix it and/or if I should even be concerned with it? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | shilohstreet0 -
Login Page Redirection
Hello, I have certain pages on my site which are login only. Am wondering if a user reaches that page, should I send him to a 301 redirect to a new login page? or some other form of redirection? Any suggestions on how to best tackle this situation? Update If I redirect to a login.php page, then what kind of redirection should I use? Thank you for your time, Anant
On-Page Optimization | | anantgarg0