Canonical questions
-
Hi,
We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories)
So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this;
Product 1 (landing page)
- Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) - BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page)
Product 2 (landing page)
- Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) - BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc
The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns.
As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content?
Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks! - Audi (model selection page)
-
No problem. Do share screenshots of product pages and the URLs (once available) here. Will be able to help you out with this. Fixing is using canonical or meta robots is not a time taking solution to implement in general and hence, can be fixed at the last moment (before going live) as well. So, this can be parked for now.
-
Thanks for that,
It could be an issue creating 'unique' content on every page as potentially there will be A LOT of pages (one for each major car make & model) but you might be right. I'll have a think and a chat with the dev team.
Thanks again.
-
Hi David,
Thanks for sharing a couple of instances to help me understand the point here. Well, I don't think there is any need of blocking these pages from indexing. You're confused about it just because you don't have much content to show on these pages and the templates is similar and hence, google might consider them as duplicate pages, right?
To resolve this issue and also, to make these pages stronger from organic visibility perspective, you would need to add on-page content and other "cool" features to make them powerful anyways. But, blocking them for bots won't be a good solution I believe.
Btw, if sharing the URLs of the pages is not possible as its in development phase, could you please share the screenshots of the pages here? Would be able to comment on how this should be handled once after having a look at it.
-
Thanks Nitin,
The site is in development so unfortunately I can't share a URL but I found a link that is not a million miles away from what we are doing, see below. My concern was because the bulk of the content on each page will be the same. Each page will be structure something like this:
Page Title
Car model detail (lets say Audi A4)Generic product information for 4 product types:
Product 1
Product 2
etcSomething like this:
http://www.carscovers.co.uk/AUDI-A4-ALLROAD-CAR-COVER-2008-ONWARDS.html
http://www.carscovers.co.uk/BMW-1-SERIES-COUPE-CABRIOLET-CAR-COVER-2004-ONWARDS.htmlAs you will see, the main content on each of the pages above is the same. (because the actual product is the same).
Does this help describe the potential issue?
-
Hi David,
If header and other details are different on these pages, why would you like to set canonical or somehow block these pages from indexing? That should be a candidate for duplicate content penalty I believe.
Could you please share some sample URLs to help me understand the issue you're talking about? I'll try my best to guide to handling this neatly from SEO perspective.
-
You welcome! Enjoy the rest of your day.
-
That does help, not sure how I missed that. Thanks Benjamin.
-
Hi David,
You might find this will help you. https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
Other than that, someone else may be able to answer your question in more detail if that helps.
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
-
Question about Topics and subjects of sentences
Hello, This might be a bit of technical question but how is google linking entities together ? I understand that when writing a piece of content I need to cover multiple topics (which are also entities as far as I understand). Then, in order for google to link multiple entities together my guess is that my sentence needs to be written in subject, predicate, object format ? where my topic / entity comes out as the subject of the sentence. For example if I write that: "Tuscany is a famous for it's rolling hills?, here the subject is Tuscany which is what I want as it one of the topics I want to cover. But let's say that instead I write:" Rolling hills is something you find everywhere in Tuscany". Here Tuscany doesn't help because it isn't a subject and is just dropped there, correct ? Concerning the attributs of my entities (the object), does google have a list of what is right of wrong. For example if I say that Washington is the capital of italy ? can I be penalised for that ? I guess this is called entity disambiguation ? If the capital of italy would also be called Washington I believe that I would be ok but see that it isn't, can it hurt ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
GWT url parameter issue/question
Hi Moz community, I'm having an issue with URL parameters in GWT. The tracking taxonomy for my websites is used as either /?izid=... (internal) OR /?dzid=... (external) I put tracking parameters in GWT as izid & dzid, but it hasn't picked up any URLs or examples in regards to these parameters. It's been about 2 months since we've started using this so I want to make sure Google isn't indexing as duplicate content. Side note: any page that uses a tracking parameter automatically adds rel="canonical" to the original page. Could this be the reason that GWT doesn't pick up any URLs for tracking parameters and/or do I not need to worry about adding paramters if I already have the canonical attribute automatically in place. Thanks for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
I have a question regarding parking good value domain.
I have a question regarding parking good value domain. A client has a great website 'A' with page rank of 5 and a lot of traffic. They want to change the URL and redesign the site. So they have parked the domain 'A' and will later redirect it to the new domain, this will be in a month time. My questions is, by parking the old domain 'A' would they have lost its SEO value or will it be given to the new URL once they place a 301 redirect on it. Also, would it not have been better not to park domain 'A', keep it live and just redirect it once new domain goes live, notifying Google in Webmaster tools?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OrangeGuys0 -
Followup question to rand(om) question: Would two different versions (mobile/desktop) on the same URL work well from an SEO perspective and provide a better overall end-user experience?
We read today's rand(om) question on responsive design. This is a topic we have been thinking about and ultimately landing on a different solution. Our opinion is the best user experience is two version (desktop and mobile) that live on one URL. For example, a non-mobile visitor that visits http://www.tripadvisor.com/ will see the desktop (non-responsive) version. However, if a mobile visitor (i.e. iOS) visits the same URL they will see a mobile version of the site, but it is still on the same URL There is not a separate subdomain or URL - instead the page dynamically changes based on the end user's user agent. It looks like they are accomplishing this by using javascript to change the physical layout of the page to match the user's device. This is what we are considering doing for our site. It seems this would simultaneously solve the problems mentioned in the rand(om) question and provide an even better user experience. By using this method, we can create a truly mobile version of the website that is similar to an app. Unfortunately, mobile versions and desktop users have very different expectations and behaviors while interacting with a webpage. I'm interested to hear the negative side of developing two versions of the site and using javascript to serve the "right" version on the same URL. Thanks for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidangotti0 -
Rel="canonical" questions?
On our site we have some similar pages for example in our parts page we have the link to all the electrical parts you can see here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical and we have a very similar page going from our accessories page to electrical here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical We are thinking about putting rel="canonical" from the accessories electrical page to the parts one. We would do this for several pages not just this one. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
Keyword Question: How to Target my Niche
Hello, I'm a health coach helping people with multiple sclerosis. Here's my website: bobweikel(dot)com What do you think the top 4 local keywords would be for my niche? I'm in Boise ID. I'm thinking MS Boise MS Boise Idaho Multiple Sclerosis Boise Multiple Sclerosis Boise Idaho With your intuition, do you think these are valuable keywords for a coaching site? Also, can you think of any other keywords? I want this 100% white hat.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How accurate and quick does Google pick up on canonical tags?
Hey Peeps! I was just wondering what your experiences are in how fast Google will pick up on canonical tags and how often they use the 'strong hint' in stead of leaving it be? I'm based in The Netherlands and for websites with a decent amount of content and links (where Google indexes new content quickly) they pick up on it within 1-2 weeks. So far they've ignored some canonical tags on one of my websites. Perhaps that's because they don't agree with the degree in which the pages are similar. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevenvanVessum0 -
What to do when unique content is out of the question?
SEO companies/people are always stating that unique, quality content is one of the best things for SEO... But what happens when you can't do that? I've got a movie trailer blog and of late a lot of movie agencies are now asking us to use the text description they give us along with the movie trailer. This means that some pages are going to have NO unique content. What do you do in a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0