Are there any downsides to using a canonical tag temporarily?
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I'm working on redesigning our website. One of the content types has a main archive page (/success-stories) containing all of the success stories (written by graduates of our program). Because we plan to have success stories for other people (non-graduates), I'm using category hierarchies (/success-stories/graduates and success-stories/nonprofits, for example). It will go one level deeper to organize graduates by graduation year (/success-stories/graduates/%year%).
I think this will work out well. However, we won't have non-graduate success stories for a little while, probably at least a few weeks, which means that /success-stories and /.../graduates indices will contain the same content for a while.
So my question is this: Will it hurt to use a canonical tag that points to /success-stories/graduates as the authority until the main archive page contains more than just graduates? Or would it be better to use a 302 redirect from /success-stories to /.../graduates until more diverse content is added?
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Are there any downsides? My answer to that is "I can't think of any".
On the other hand... Are there any upsides? My answer to that is.... Google can be very slow to find - and then begin to use, canonical tag instructions. On a website that gets a few hundred thousand visits per month, I have seen Google take several weeks to a few months to begin using the canonical tag instructions. On a website that gets millions of visits per month I have seen Google take a few weeks to a month to follow canonical tag instructions. In the reverse, it takes them even longer - sometimes several months - to forget canonical instructions after the tags have been removed.
If I was in your situation, I would take a "coming soon" approach with the website. On the /success-stories/ page I would simply place an announcement in a box that "success stories for nonprofits are coming soon"... then on the /success-stories/nonprofits/ page, I would give an enthusiastic description about "what will be here"... and much of that might be useful for when the full page is finally up.
As for the /year/ pages, I would not make them until you have viable content to populate them. You can make them in a sandbox area, but just not upload or link to them until you have ready-for-visitors content.
I find that sometimes a hard part of being a good webmaster is waiting until good content is ready.
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