Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
-
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site.
Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point)
It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages.
love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
-
There's no perfect solution, but Google's advice is to use rel=prev/next. This looks like pretty classic pagination. Rel-canonical is a stronger signal, but it's generally going to keep pages 2+ from ranking.
-
Dr. Pete,
I have a internal debate going and I was hoping you might be a tie breaker on rel=canonical vs noindex given these paginated pages and might be a good use case for others:
https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park
https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park/page-2
The individual list items are unique, but clearly want to rank for essentially the exact same terms. Page titles, metas, copy about cit is the same. Just the list elements are different, but not a 12 pack of pens, 24 pack etc. Is this tricky or clear?
-
Thank you Sir. I think we reached the same conclusion.
By the way, the it was a just a simple example of the page hierarchy - we're not doing Horror Books
-
I haven't heard any SEO recommendations or benefits regarding rel="contents". Rel=prev/next has mixed results, but I'd generally only use it for its specific use case of paginated content.
I guess you could treat V2 as "pages" within V1. If you did that, what you'd need to do is treat the main page as a "View All" page and link to it from each author page. I'm not sure if that's the best approach, but it's more or less Google-approved.
If the site has decent authority and we're only talking 100s of pages, I might let them all live in the index and see what happens. Let Google sort it out, and then decide if you're ok with the outcome. If the site is low authority and/or we're talking 1000s of pages, I might be more cautious.
It's hard to speak in generalities - it depends a lot on the quality of the site and nature of the pages, including how much that content is available/duplicated across the web. One problem here is that author pages with lists of books probably exist on many sites, so you have to differentiate yourself.
-
Good. Same page
I was looking in to rel=contents and those variations before, but I can't quite decide whether this is worth the effort or not.
e.g. There's a huge list of resources on a single page, segmented in to categories. The page is HUGE and takes ages to load, so I've been creating new pages for each segment and optimising those pages independently, but there is some common content with the primary page.
V1: Horror Novels page has a section for each author, each section lists all novels by that author.
V2: Each Author has a page which lists novels by that author, but links back to the Horror Novels page which is essentially an index of the Author pages. Would you also
Would you use rel=contents, rel=prev/next or a different approach in this case? From what I've read so far, there doesn't seem any "SEO value" in linking that way.
I guess we're trying to improve the UX through faster load times and segmenting the information in smaller chunks, but also presenting a number of pages to Google as a body of content rather than a single page without causing issues with duplicate or similar content - we just need to make sure that we're optimising it in the right way, of course.
-
I would Meta Noindex an "email this page" template. It has no value for SERPs, it's generally at the end of a path, and no one is going to link to it. Just keep it out of the index altogether.
-
Thanks Pete
So, for a more specific example, if an eCommerce store has an "email this product" page for each product (Magento seems to love doing this and creates a duplicate of the same email page for every product), would you recommend a canonical link for each of those pages to the main Contact page or canonically linking each page to each related product page?
From setup, I'd consider NoIndex on all of those pages anyway, but it's a bit late for that once a site has been live for years.
The email pages are obviously related to the product page, but the content there isn't anywhere near identical.
Or maybe there's a "more appropriate solution" that you alluded to?
-
To clarify, that's the official stance - rel=canonical should only be used on true duplicates (basically, URL variants of the same page). In practice, rel=canonical works perfectly well on near-duplicates, and sometimes even on wildly different pages, but the more different you get, the more caution you should exercise. If the pages are wildly different, it's likely there are more appropriate solutions.
-
Hey Pete
Can you explain, "you can't use rel=canonical on pages that aren't 100% duplicates" a little further please?
Do you mean that only duplicate pages should be canonicalised? Identical pages in two different sub-directories is fine, but two similar pages is not?
-
So, here's the problem - if you follow the official uses of our options, then there is no answer. You can't have thin content or Google will slap you with Panda (or, at the very least, devalue your rankings, you can't use rel=canonical on pages that aren't 100% duplicates, and you're not supposed to (according to Google) just NOINDEX content. The official advice is: "Let us sort it out, but if we don't sort it out, we'll smack you down."
I don't mean that to be critical of your comment, but I'm very frustrated with the official party line from Google. Practically speaking, I've found index control to be extremely effective even before Panda, and critical for big sites post-Panda. Sometimes, that means embracing imperfect solutions. The right tool for any situation can be complex (and it may be a combination of tools), but rel=canonical is powerful and often effective, in my experience.
-
It seems to me that for most ecommerce sites (myself included) that canonical is not the answer. If you have to many near identical products on your site it may be better to re evaluate what you have stocking and if you must stock them then the way forward is to make one page that properly explains them and allows purchase rather than many.
The only uses I can see for canonical is to consolidate old blogs and articles on similar topics. Using it to tidy an ecommerce site seems to be a misuse of the tool.
-
This can get tricky when you dive into the details, but I general agree with Takeshi and EGOL - consolidate or canonicalize. If the products are different brands/versions of a similar item, it's a bit trickier, but these variations do have a way of spinning out of control. In 2013, I think the down side of your index running wild is a lot higher than the up side of ranking for a couple more long-tail terms. It does depend a lot on your traffic, business model, etc., though. I'm not sure any of us can adequately advise you in the scope of a Q&A.
-
Also I forgot to mention that in this way you also don't have to worry about creating tons of different product descriptions because you will put one description for, let's say, 6 different products.
the way we built it, allow us to have just product group pages are reachable; the products pages are indexed and crawled and they have to be there otherwise the whole system wouldn't work, but no optimization is done on them and customers can't see it.
-
Hello there,
I manage an e-commerce site and because we have similar products and issues with duplicate content we have implemented product groups pages with a drop-down menu' listing the different options for a particular product and then we have used the rel="canonical" with the different product pages. In this way we have solved this issue and it works very well.
If you do implement it, make sure every passage is done correctly otherwise, as Matt Cutts says, you will have an headache trying to sort it out.
Hope it helps
-
Those pen offers are very very similar. Identical product descriptions except for perhaps number being sold or color or width of the tip.
If these were on my site they would all be on the same page. One page to concentrate/conserve the linkjuice. One page to make thicker content. One page to present all of the options to the customer at same time. (PITA to click between lots of pages to make up your mind as a shopper). One page to make maintenance easy.
-
Thanks
-
Yes, I've used this approach for a number of ecommerce clients, and it is very effective. There are many advantages to this approach:
- Eliminating duplicate/thin content across the site
- Focusing link value on a single page instead of spreading out across multiple products
- Less effort creating unique content (one page vs multiple)
- Potentially better user experience
Of course, if you have the resources to write unique content for each of your product pages, that is going to be a better solution. You can still create a landing page in this instance, you just wouldn't canonical the product pages to it.
-
Have you used this approach? If so how effective is it?
-
If you want to rank for "flat head screw driver", the canonical approach can still work. Simply create a landing page for flat head screw drivers, and include all of the flat head screwdriver products from each of the different brands. Then canonical each of the individual product pages up to the main landing page.
-
I have all the usual colour size attributes on my products. I just used that as a simple example. Its more to do with similar non branded products that are different enough to be "products" but not when I have 15 similar it's impossible to write fully different descriptions. Screwdrivers, screws or paint would have been a better example. There are hundreds of ranges like that. If you had five unimportant brands of screwdriver and you had flat head and philips head. Each one is marginally different (handle style etc) but there is no keyword benefit to having each optimised for say "flat head screwdriver". Having a good range is beneficial to the customer but seems to be detrimental to SEO. Is it better to employ writers to make every description different no matter how complex or should I canonical it?
-
Yes, that is a good solution, especially in this post-Panda world. Ideally you would just have one page for Bic pens, with a drop down from which you can select different options such as colors & size. If your shopping cart system doesn't allow you to do that, then the canonical is a good approach. This cuts down on the amount of duplicate content you have and the amount of unique content you need to create.
-
Have a client in the exact same situation. Check to see if you are currently getting traffic for terms that would be specific to having separate pages (e.g. "50 blue bic pens" versus a more general "bic blue pens"). If you don't, then you should canonical to one page. If you do, I'd keep it as is and work on diversifying the product pages more.
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
-
Product pages and rank brain
Hello, On product pages does the content matter or does the presentation and answering the user intent matter more ? I know for informational query content definitely matters but with rank brain, I am thinking that for pages where your present product content doesn't matter as much ? Am I right ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Crawling/indexing of near duplicate product pages
Hi, Hope someone can help me out here. This is the current situation: We sell stones/gravel/sand/pebbles etc. for gardens. I will take a type of pebbles and the corresponding pages/URL's to illustrate my question --> black beach pebbles. We have a 'top' product page for black beach pebbles on which you can find different types of quantities (differing from 20kg untill 1600 kg). There is not any search volume related to the different quantities The 'top' page does not link to the pages for the different quantities The content on the pages for the different quantities is not exactly the same (different price + slightly different content). But a lot of the content is the same. Current situation:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
- Most pages for the different quantities do not have internal links (about 95%) But the sitemap does contain all of these pages. Because the sitemap contains all these URL's, google frequently crawls them (I checked the logfiles) and has indexed them. Problems: Google spends its time crawling irrelevant pages --> our entire website is not that big, so these quantity URL's kind of double the total number of URL's. Having url's in the sitemap that do not have an internal link is a problem on its own All these pages are indexed so all sorts of gravel/pebbles have near duplicates. My solution: remove these URL's from the sitemap --> that will probably stop Google from regularly crawling these pages Putting a canonical on the quantity pages pointing to the top-product page. --> that will hopefully remove the irrelevant (no search volume) near duplicates from the index My questions: To be able to see the canonical, google will need to crawl these pages. Will google still do that after removing them from the sitemap? Do you agree that these pages are near duplicates and that it is best to remove them from the index? A few of these quantity pages do have intenral links (a few procent of them) because of a sale campaign. So there will be some (not much) internal links pointing to non-canonical pages. Would that be a problem? Thanks a lot in advance for your help! Best!1 -
Mass uploading low quality product pages
Hi Mozzers! I have a question on mass uploading low quality product pages We have a huge catalogue of products and our product managers are looking to mass reference 17,000 new products quickly on the website. Obviously, this will mean content will somehow have to be made unique - which would take a huge amount of resource. Apart from this issue, will adding this many new product pages in one go be bad for SEO? If we also do manage to make the content unique, but not high quality - we'll have 17,000 new low quality product pages - will this reduce our domain authority? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Switching from HTTP to HTTPS: 301 redirect or keep both & rel canonical?
Hey Mozzers, I'll be moving several sites from HTTP to HTTPS in the coming weeks (same brand, multiple ccTLDs). We'll start on a low traffic site and test it for 2-4 weeks to see the impact before rolling out across all 8 sites. Ideally, I'd like to simply 301 redirect the HTTP version page to the HTTPS version of the page (to get that potential SEO rankings boost). However, I'm concerned about the potential drop in rankings, links and traffic. I'm thinking of alternative ways and so instead of the 301 redirect approach, I would keep both sites live and accessible, and then add rel canonical on the HTTPS pages to point towards HTTP so that Google keeps the current pages/ links/ indexed as they are today (in this case, HTTPS is more UX than for SEO). Has anyone tried the rel canonical approach, and if so, what were the results? Do you recommend it? Also, for those who have implemented HTTPS, how long did it take for Google to index those pages over the older HTTP pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven_Macdonald0 -
A/B Testing - Should I add product descriptions on my category landing pages as well as on product pages and if so . how to do this to avoid duplicate content
Hi All, I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design. My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view. My question is , previously in our list views we just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc.. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?... Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc. Any advice greatly appreciated as always thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages. Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then) For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time. Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ? Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchitmalik0 -
Quick Rel Canonical Link Juice Question
Let's say I have two duplicate pages, A and B. However, A has 5 external links and B has 3 _different _external links. If I add the rel canonical tag to B, so that A is the "master page" do I also lose whatever link juice was going to B from the 3 external links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0