Article page canonicalization

[Adriaan.Multiply]

Hey there,

A client rents all kinds of party articles, like plates, bowles, etc. Currently, al his article pages have canonicals to their parent category pages, supposedly to have any pagevalue flow to these category pages, (which are much more relevant for SEO).

Is there anyone who agrees with this method? I think a noindex,follow would be a better measure to prevent Google from accessing all these 'low value' article pages. Besides, a canonical should indicate that page A and B are (almost) identical, which they most certainly are not in this case.

What are your thoughts?

[Adriaan.Multiply]

Thank you Andy, this does answer, and confirm, my situation/expectation. But, what you are suggestion is quite a high-maintenance solution, because if my client adds another couple of plates, they'd all need new canonicals to the 'main product page' that we want to rank.

[Adriaan.Multiply]

Hi James,

With articles, I meant 'products for rent', they are not written articles.

The point in having them in the first place is because this is how the website works. Every product that clients can rent has its own page, so you could rent a brown plate from brand X or a blue plate from brand Y and both would have their own url and page.

I would really like to combine every version/variation of the product in a single page/url, but that has a large technical impact, and will probably be too expensive.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Adriaan,

In terms of handling low value pages, Google advises you make the pages better rather than no-indexing them.

If that can't be handled easily, I would be looking to suggest that canonical tags are used only if there are similar multiples that relate to a main primary page. So if you had 10 pages of plates with different designs from one main page about plates, then you would canonicalise these. Ideally you would have the multiple options on one page.

Does that answer your situation?

-Andy