How to combine 2 pages (same domain) that rank for same keyword?

[rayvensoft]

Hi Mozzers,

A quick question.  In the last few months I have noticed that for a number of keywords I am having 2 different pages on my domain show up in the SERP.  Always right next to each other (for example, position #7 and #8 or #3 and #4).  So in the SERP it looks something like:

1. www.mycompetition1.com
2. www.mycompetition2.com
3. www.mywebsite.com/page1.html
   4) www.mywebsite.com**/page2.html**
   5) www.mycompetition3.com

Now, I actually need both pages since the content on both pages is different - but on the same topic.  Both pages have links to them, but page1.html always tends to have more.  So, what is the best practice to tell Google that I only want 1 page to rank?  Of course, the idea is that by combining the SEO Juice of both pages, I can push my way up to position 2 or 1.

Does anybody have any experience in this?  Any advice is much appreciated.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Realistically, the tag should be used for duplicates, yes. How "duplicated" a page is, is subjective: a page with 50% of the same content as another page is probably going to count as duplicated as far as Google goes... where that line of duplication acceptability goes isn't something any of us really know.

For pages where the content is totally different besides the header and footer, you technically shouldn't use canonicalisation. However, experiments have shown that Google honours the tag, even if the pages aren't duplicates. Dr. Pete did an experiment when the tag came out (admittedly a few years ago) where he showed that you could radically reduce the number of pages Google had indexed for a site by canonicalising everything to the home page. I personally had a client do this by accident a couple of years ago, and sure enough, their number of indexed pages dropped very quickly, along with all the rankings those pages had. As an ecommerce site that was ranking for clothing terms, this was very very bad. It took about six weeks to get those rankings back again after we fixed the tags, and the tags were fixed within about five days (should have been quicker but our urgent request went into a dev queue).

So the answer would be that Google seems to honour the tag no matter the content of the pages, but I am pretty sure that if you asked a Googler, they'd tell you that it should only be used for dupes or near-dupes.

[rayvensoft]

Hi Jane,

Thanks for the advice.  One question.  I was under the impression that the rel="canonical" tag was for two pages that had the same content to let google know that the page it is pointing to is the original and should be the one to rank.  Do you have any experience using them between 2 pages that have totally different content (minus the header and footer)?

Thanks again.

[JaneCopland]

If you are happy for the second page to still exist but not rank, you should use the canonical tag to point the second page to the first one. This will lend the first page the majority of the strength of the second page and perhaps improve its authority and ranking as a result. However, the second page will no longer be indexed because the canonical tag tells Google: "ignore this page over here; it should be considered the same as the canonical version, here."

Again, this can benefit the first page, but it does mean that the second page will no longer rank at all. Only do this if you are okay with that scenario.

Cheers,

Jane

[SamuelScott]

I'm afraid that there isn't a perfect solution, but there are various options to consider.

1.) The only way to "combine the SEO juice of both pages" is to 301 redirect one of the pages to the other (and add the content from the old page to the remaining one). However, this means that the second page will no longer exist for your website visitors (coming from organic search or not).

2.) You can use a rel=canonical tag pointing from the secondary page to the preferred one to encourage Google to list only the preferred one the pages in search results. In addition, you could use the robots.txt file or noindex meta tag (the meta tag is the preferred option) to block search engines from indexing the page and having it appear in search results. However, this will not "combine the SEO juice."

Assuming that it is crucial that the second page still exist on your website, I would probably not do anything. You appear twice in the first page of results -- great! Why mess with that? I would just focus on doing all the good SEO best practices and earning more links to those two pages to push them higher over time. (Of course, if I knew your exact situation, I would probably have additional suggestions.)