Training events - optimisation and avoiding cannibalisation
-
This is quite a broad question I’m afraid – any help would be appreciated.
I’m trying to find the best way of optimising our new training pages. These events are aimed at teaching our customers how to use our software to do different tasks. Inevitably, the themes and naming of these training workshops overlap with some of our products. A close example would be, to make up a product, ‘Keyword Ranker’ and ‘Keyword Ranker Training’.
Someone has raised the concern that the training pages might start outranking the pages for our main tool, particularly as the training will be heavily promoted via social media. Also, the on-page content talks about similar topics. They’ve suggested that we use rel=canonical tags pointing from the each training page to the related product page to prevent this from happening.
I myself don’t think this is a good idea as this is not what the rel=canonical tags are designed for. I think that they might prevent the events pages ranking for any query at all, which is not what we want. Also, I believe that the training pages and the products are different enough that Google will work out which to rank for relevant queries. Has anyone else had an experience of doing this? Are there any approaches that people would recommend? Or is this something that we shouldn’t be worried about?
A few other thoughts that I’ve had:
-
Using schema.org event markup to emphasise what the events pages are about.
-
Making sure to remove old events once they have expired. I thought it best to let these 404 as I’ve read that 301s to a category page than cause Google to penalise content.
-
Putting internal links from the product pages to the relevant training workshop pages.
-
Using the meta unavailable tag on events pages, so that when the event has happened then it will be removed from Google’s index.
-
-
Thanks for your thoughts Linda - much appreciated
-
A couple of thoughts--yes, that is not what rel=canonical is for. It is meant for identical or nearly identical pages. If you wanted that effect you could noindex the training pages, but you say you don't want that, so both of those choices are out.
If you have multiple training pages that go to one product, you will presumably have links on those multiple training pages back to that one product page, and that will be a sign to Google that the product page is important.
Also, if the product page stays up and the training pages are up for a short while and then go away, those short-term training pages are unlikely to overtake the product page that remains up and is able to attract links and other positive signals.
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
-
Multiple pages optimised for the same keywords but pages are functionally different and visually different
Hi MOZ community! We're wondering what the implications would be on organic ranking by having 2 pages, which have quite different functionality were optimised for the same keywords. So, for example, one of the pages in question is
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
https://www.whichledlight.com/categories/led-spotlights
and the other page is
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/led-spotlights both of these pages are basically geared towards the keyword led spotlights the first link essentially shows the options for led spotlights, the different kind of fittings available, and the second link is a product search / results page for all products that are spotlights. We're wondering what the implications of this could be, as we are currently looking to improve the ranking for the site particularly for this keyword. Is this even safe to do? Especially since we're at the bottom of the hill of climbing the ranking ladder of this keyword. Give us a shout if you want any more detail on this to answer more easily 🙂0 -
Are 1x Event pages considered thin content? Should they be archived or redirected?
Since past event pages will become stale after the event, should they be keep alive and archived with only a link from a couple of places (for instance the main event page and html sitemap). Or should they be "retired" and redirected to the main event page if they are really no longer needed? They would probably be considered thin content because they won't have much traffic and will have very few links pointing to them. Right? Thanks. Inquiring minds want to know... 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cindyt-170380 -
Question about optimising an inner pages apposed to the homepage
Hi Everyone, I'm currently looking to optimise the inner page of a website opposed to the homepage itself. I was wondering if I should stick to some kind of link distribution? For instance, say my website is about widgets and the url is http://www.widgets.com, I want to optimise for a much easier "blue widgets" term on an inner page with the url: http://www.widgets.com/blue-widgets. Does google discriminate against a website with a higher number of links pointing to an inner page than the homepage? If so, what would you recommend a safe distribution between the two? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Content with Used Car Listings Database: Robots.txt vs Noindex vs Hash URLs (Help!)
Hi Guys, We have developed a plugin that allows us to display used vehicle listings from a centralized, third-party database. The functionality works similar to autotrader.com or cargurus.com, and there are two primary components: 1. Vehicle Listings Pages: this is the page where the user can use various filters to narrow the vehicle listings to find the vehicle they want.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | browndoginteractive
2. Vehicle Details Pages: this is the page where the user actually views the details about said vehicle. It is served up via Ajax, in a dialog box on the Vehicle Listings Pages. Example functionality: http://screencast.com/t/kArKm4tBo The Vehicle Listings pages (#1), we do want indexed and to rank. These pages have additional content besides the vehicle listings themselves, and those results are randomized or sliced/diced in different and unique ways. They're also updated twice per day. We do not want to index #2, the Vehicle Details pages, as these pages appear and disappear all of the time, based on dealer inventory, and don't have much value in the SERPs. Additionally, other sites such as autotrader.com, Yahoo Autos, and others draw from this same database, so we're worried about duplicate content. For instance, entering a snippet of dealer-provided content for one specific listing that Google indexed yielded 8,200+ results: Example Google query. We did not originally think that Google would even be able to index these pages, as they are served up via Ajax. However, it seems we were wrong, as Google has already begun indexing them. Not only is duplicate content an issue, but these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly! If a user were to navigate to the url directly, from the SERPs, they would see a page that isn't styled right. Now we have to determine the right solution to keep these pages out of the index: robots.txt, noindex meta tags, or hash (#) internal links. Robots.txt Advantages: Super easy to implement Conserves crawl budget for large sites Ensures crawler doesn't get stuck. After all, if our website only has 500 pages that we really want indexed and ranked, and vehicle details pages constitute another 1,000,000,000 pages, it doesn't seem to make sense to make Googlebot crawl all of those pages. Robots.txt Disadvantages: Doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, as we've seen, probably because there are internal links to these pages. We could nofollow these internal links, thereby minimizing indexation, but this would lead to each 10-25 noindex internal links on each Vehicle Listings page (will Google think we're pagerank sculpting?) Noindex Advantages: Does prevent vehicle details pages from being indexed Allows ALL pages to be crawled (advantage?) Noindex Disadvantages: Difficult to implement (vehicle details pages are served using ajax, so they have no tag. Solution would have to involve X-Robots-Tag HTTP header and Apache, sending a noindex tag based on querystring variables, similar to this stackoverflow solution. This means the plugin functionality is no longer self-contained, and some hosts may not allow these types of Apache rewrites (as I understand it) Forces (or rather allows) Googlebot to crawl hundreds of thousands of noindex pages. I say "force" because of the crawl budget required. Crawler could get stuck/lost in so many pages, and my not like crawling a site with 1,000,000,000 pages, 99.9% of which are noindexed. Cannot be used in conjunction with robots.txt. After all, crawler never reads noindex meta tag if blocked by robots.txt Hash (#) URL Advantages: By using for links on Vehicle Listing pages to Vehicle Details pages (such as "Contact Seller" buttons), coupled with Javascript, crawler won't be able to follow/crawl these links. Best of both worlds: crawl budget isn't overtaxed by thousands of noindex pages, and internal links used to index robots.txt-disallowed pages are gone. Accomplishes same thing as "nofollowing" these links, but without looking like pagerank sculpting (?) Does not require complex Apache stuff Hash (#) URL Disdvantages: Is Google suspicious of sites with (some) internal links structured like this, since they can't crawl/follow them? Initially, we implemented robots.txt--the "sledgehammer solution." We figured that we'd have a happier crawler this way, as it wouldn't have to crawl zillions of partially duplicate vehicle details pages, and we wanted it to be like these pages didn't even exist. However, Google seems to be indexing many of these pages anyway, probably based on internal links pointing to them. We could nofollow the links pointing to these pages, but we don't want it to look like we're pagerank sculpting or something like that. If we implement noindex on these pages (and doing so is a difficult task itself), then we will be certain these pages aren't indexed. However, to do so we will have to remove the robots.txt disallowal, in order to let the crawler read the noindex tag on these pages. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me to make googlebot crawl zillions of vehicle details pages, all of which are noindexed, and it could easily get stuck/lost/etc. It seems like a waste of resources, and in some shadowy way bad for SEO. My developers are pushing for the third solution: using the hash URLs. This works on all hosts and keeps all functionality in the plugin self-contained (unlike noindex), and conserves crawl budget while keeping vehicle details page out of the index (unlike robots.txt). But I don't want Google to slap us 6-12 months from now because it doesn't like links like these (). Any thoughts or advice you guys have would be hugely appreciated, as I've been going in circles, circles, circles on this for a couple of days now. Also, I can provide a test site URL if you'd like to see the functionality in action.0 -
Best practices with reoccurring event listings
On our client's events page there are a few reoccurring events that each have their own detail page. I'm trying to figure out what's the best practice for minimising duplicate content. For example, for the Bribie Island Markets that repeat weekly there are 2 (+more) detailed event pages: http://www.ourbribie.com/e/bribie-island-markets/1869/2013-12-07/2013-12-07
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | michaelp85
http://www.ourbribie.com/e/bribie-island-markets/1869/2013-12-14/2013-12-14 While they both contain duplicated content, they're unique in that they display the specific events date/time. My thinking is that the future events (e.g. 2013-12-14) should have a canonical link to the upcoming/next event (i.e. 2013-12-07). However this would require constantly updating/changing the canonical links. What's the best way to deal with this from a duplicate content prospective? Any better recommendations?0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How do I best optimise a page with 3 keywords that all contain 1 common word?
I am new to this so still getting to grips with a few things. I have a page here that I want to optimise for 3 keyword phrases. Towels, Egyptian Cotton Towels, Personalised Towels http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/catlist_fnct561.htm SEOmoz reports a huge number of instances of the word towels overall. Title 3 URL 1 Meta Desc 5 H1 3 H2-4 1 Body 83 B / Strong 1 IMG ALT 11 Total Keyword Usage for this Page = 108How could i restructure meta tags and descriptions to still rank for these terms but reduce the level the word towels? Similarly as this is a category how can I reduce the term towels from other on page links?Also any extra advice regarding on page optimisation would be greatly appreciated to help our efforts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0