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
-
SEO strategy for conversion-optimised home page
I'm working on a very conventional-type site with a home page (why come to us), methods we use, pricing, reviews, FAQs and contact us. After reading the Moz case study at (http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/), I have been working on a conversion-optimised home page that consolidates much of content in all these pages. At the bottom of the home page, I then plan to add a list of blog posts "Want to read more? We have a lot of useful information on our blog. Here are the most popular articles:" with articles that explain more about the methods we use for example (content that was formerly on our methods page). Obviously this new blog will also have more interesting information (but a lot that could actually be converted into pages) This radically changes the site into just a home page full of selling points and calls-to-action and a blog. I have some questions about this strategy: How do we keep our search engine ranking for keywords such as "[our service] prices" or "[a particular method] London". We rank quite well on Google for these and it goes straight to the relevant page. Shall we keep the pages active somewhere even though the information is also on the home page? Is a blog actually necessary here (SEO wise)? The things I'm planning to write could easily be made into more pages. Am I going about this completely wrong by trying using the CRO guide? Should this sort of page be reserved for landing pages? The reason why I'm considering making a conversion-generating home page is because we only sell one service pretty much (although there are differences in how we do it on children vs. adults) and because we are quite niche so most of our traffic comes from organic sources. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LondonAli0 -
Schema.org mark up to avoid duplicate issue?
Hey there, I was wondering, does product's mark-up help to avoid penalization due to duplicate content? Here is the example: one of my client doesn't supply unique content. Because the major part of the content is technical description of products made by a couple of manufactures, do you think it will help me to link the official manufacturer webpage in a schena.org product mark-up? I know this is the right procedure to add mark-ups, but as on the pages of my client an outbound-link will show up, so I want to tell him this will be the only way to have that duplicate content without incurring in penalisation. I'd like to give him more than one solution, as I'm pretty sure it will never supply us with unique content. Thanks Pierpaolo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | madcow780 -
Offpage Optimisation
I have currently completed onsite optimization for my ecom site. Now i am focusing towards offpage. I like get the experts from where to start. I like to get help on where to start getting the quality backlinks for my site. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nsale0 -
Should I change my product titles from singular to plural to satisfy optimisation?
At present most of our products are listed in the singular form. http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-towels/aztex/turkish-cotton-bath-towel_ct473bd182pd2744.htm However we are optimising for the plural form after carrying out keyword research The question is should I update the product title to reflect this change? This would then change the URL of the page, H1 tag, H2 tag (both auto generated from the product title) My concern here is that these pages will then become "new pages" and will need to index and rank, albeit they don't rank well as they have never been optimised until now. I could put 301 re-directs in place on the old URL's or i could just let the return a 404. What do people think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
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 reduce internal links & cannibalisation from primiary navigation?
SEOmoz tools is reporting each page on our site containing in excess of 200 internal links mostly from our primary navigation menu which it says is too many. This also causes cannibalization on the word towels which i would like to avoid if possible. Is there a way to reduce the number of internal links whilst maintaining a good structure to allow link juice to filter through the site and also reduce cannibalization?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
How else to find backlinks for training site
Hello, How would you recommend finding and gaining backlinks for nlpca(dot)com other than looking at the top 10 competitors? Also, we could do an infographic but the owners don't have time to produce a lot of additional articles. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Website redesign - how do I avoid screwing up my site SEO?
We are preparing to launch a newly designed (and much improved) website in the next few months. I want to be very careful to ensure we do not mess up any rankings (and hopefully actually improve rankings) when switching over the site. I'm particularly concerned about one key phrase that our homepage currently ranks on. After the redesign it would be more appropriate for our of our subpages to rank for that term, but I'd rather have our homepage rank (less relevant for this keyword than the subpage) then nothing at all. I know about 301 redirects, and we are planning on creating a few comprehensive diagrams to ensure we redirect old pages to the correct new pages. Beyond that, what can I do to preserve our rankings? Thanks! -Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanD.0