Which is the best option for these pages?

[seowork214]

Hi Guys,

We have product pages on our site which have duplicate content, the search volume for people searching for these products is very, very small. Also if we add unique content, we could face keyword cannibalisation issues with category/sub-category pages.

Now based on proper SEO best practice we should add rel canonical tags from these product pages to the next relevant page.

Pros

• Can rank for product oriented keywords but search volume is very small.

• Any link equity to these pages passed due to the rel canonical tag would be very small, as these pages barely get any links.

Cons

• Time and effort involved in adding rel canonical tags. Even if we do add rel canonical tags, if Google doesn't deem them relevant then they might ignore causing duplicate content issues.

• Time and effort involved in making all the content unique - not really worth it - again very minimal searchers. Plus if we do make it unique, then we face keyword cannibalisation issues.

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What do you think would be the optimal solution to this?

I'm thinking just implementing a:

Across all these product based pages.

Keen to hear thoughts?

Cheers.

[MikeTek]

Hello,

As Martin suggested, it seems any option will require time and effort.

Are you sure these pages are causing an issue with duplicate content? Are they ranking and pulling traffic/sales?

I'm dubious these pages are having a negative impact. I would want to verify that as much as possible before expending the resource to canonical or take other action.

That said, canonical would be the recommended solution here - and should take no more effort than the "noindex" tag.

Best,
Mike

[benesmartin]

Hey there,

Those "Cons" you named are basically your options. Either add rel canonical or create unique content. Technically, you can delete the page as well, but I guess it's not the option you're considering.

It's true that it takes time and effort so this would be probably your decisive factor. Just decide what take less time and is more convenient. I vote for adding the canonical tag.

Regarding the _low search volume, _every visitor is valuable as long as he/she converts. It might be 1 visit a day through that KW but (depending on your conversion rate and the price of what you're selling) I think it's worth it.

If you add "noindex" to your page, Google will still be able to crawl your page and see the duplicate content. So I'd choose one of the two options mentioned above.

Hope it helps.
Cheers, Martin