Rel=canonical or 301 to pass on page authority/juice

[rachelholdgrafer]

I have a large body of product support documentation and there are similar pages for each of versions of the product, with minor changes as the product changes. The two oldest versions of this documentation get the best ranking and are powering Google snippets--however, this content is out of date.

The team responsible for the support documentation wants current pages to rank higher. I suggested 301 redirects but they want to maintain the old page content for clients still using the older version of the product. Is there a way to move a page's power to a more updated version of the page, but without wiping out the old content?

Considering recommending canonical tags, but I'm not sure this will get me all the way there either as there are some differences between pages, especially as the product has changed over time.

Thoughts?

[ThompsonPaul]

Knowing that with a large body of documentation like this, the chances of being able to rewrite it all to combine into a single page are pretty slim (and knowing that might be a very negative user experience) you're really only left with the canonical tag option - assuming the older docs need to be maintained.

You're right to be concerned, as Google has been clear that canonical only applies to pages that have substantially identical content. Unfortunately, they do a really poor job of explaining just how much variation would be allowed.

Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.
~ https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

My impression is that they would honour canonical in your use case.

Really, the only way to know is to select a couple of products' documentation pages and conduct a test. Canonicalise all old version to the current version and request re-indexing for each page. Then monitor the results (The new index monitoring tools in the new GSC are useful for this). You'll want to choose at least one test case that involves featured snippets - it would be incredibly useful to know if the FS transfers across to the new canonical page!

Do note that you'll need an ongoing process for managing the canonicals s each new iteration of documentation is added - all related pages will need to have their canonicals updated to point to the newest each time new docs are published.

Interesting conundrum. Please let us know the results if you decide to try a test!

Is that useful?

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Please don't hijack someone else's question, zecase. Much better if you start your own question as it's completely unrelated to the current one.

Paul

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Well is not as simple there are many factors involved as I see both of them have a low DA but probably you have some traffic, so the first thing that you need to know is which pages are ranking, the queries of those pages, Ideally the merger process should preserve the URL structure of both and make the redirection from the server

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Basically, you have a problem because you are competing with your own content, So Google is select the old pages because from google perspective they are most trustable and have more value. So I suggest is merge them into a single one.

Let's take a simple example lets assume you have a car manufacturer like Toyota. You have a car model like Corolla and it was launched 2018 but this model has several versions L, LE, LE Eco, XLE, SE, and XSE.

So you can create a single page for each version with a parent page or parent category and it will look like this

• www.toyota.com/corolla-2018/

• www.toyota.com/corolla-2018/L

• www.toyota.com/corolla-2018/LE

• www.toyota.com/corolla-2018/XLE

But in your case based on what you mentioned Google has problems to determinate which one is the right one according to user intent. So, In that case, you can merge all those pages into a single master page  so instead of creating several you put all your content in a single page divided into several sections (anchor links)

So your site will look like this

• www.toyota.com/corolla-2018/
• www.toyota.com/corolla-2018/#L
• www.toyota.com/corolla-2018/#LE
• www.toyota.com/corolla-2018/#XLE

This is a good example of how to integrate https://kinsta.com/blog/anchor-links/

Hope this info will answer your question