Using Canonicals on category or link pages

[wearehappymedia]

Hey,

If a site has category or tag pages showing in search results for a particular keyword - sometimes higher than the page you would like to rank - could using canonical redirects on categories and tags be a solution?

Thanks

[MattRoney]

Agreed. Out of curiosity, Eric, what's your opinion of then placing "noindex, follow" on the tag-or-category pages? I've seen cases in which the pages themselves are close enough to look like duplicate content.

[GlobeRunner]

Sites that allow both category and tags pages to get indexed will definitely run into duplicate content issues. We recommend choosing one--either tags or categories. We prefer to use a select number of categories, and make sure that each category has at least two or most posts associated with each category.

Rather than use the canonical tag, it's much more effective if you just remove all of the tags on the site (if you're only using categories). That will completely remove all the duplicate content on the site.

[_nitman]

Hi,

This is a problem related to site's architecture i.e you need to expose only those pages to bots that you want to and while doing this, make sure you're not ending up with keyword cannibalization wherein you have more than one pages targeting a single keyword like in this situation.

So, its always better to take this call in the start whether you want to expose tag pages to bots or not? They might be serving exactly same content as your category pages for some keywords. As a result, you might end up with duplicate content and keyword cannibalization situations.

Short answer to your question, yes canonical should be fine here if the content is almost the same and targeting the same keyword. I would recommend you to not do this for individual pages, rather find a pattern and do it for all to avoid the same problem again.

Hope this helps!