How similar do pages need to be in order to utilize the canonical tag
-
Here is my specific situation. My company released new versions of a few documents in the fall. I was hoping that over time the old version would decline and the new version would rise but after 6 months the old version continues to rank #1 and the new version #3. The old version needs to stay on our site but users should really be getting to the most recent version. I think utilizing the canonical tag would solve the issue but i am concerned because the content on the actual pages is not duplicate but it is updated. Below are the two URLs to see the differences in the content.
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/06tr008.cfm
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/10tr033.cfm
Is this an appropriate situation to use the canonical tag? If not, is there a better solution.
-
Super thanks for the heads up. I will start an new topic.
-
Hi Conor,
Welcome to the Q&A forum! Since this is an old topic, it may not get too much visibility. You may want to start a new question in its own thread.
-
I have a similar question. One of my pages is a help and questions page about completing a conversions and the other is the actual campaign landing page. While the subject of both pages is similar the content is not. Is the rel canonical tag appropriate here? I
-
Thanks! I will try it and see how it goes
-
Right. I just wanted to give you other options aside from the canonical tag, but if your site governance doesn't allow for these solutions the canonical tag as described by SSCDavis should work well.
-
I do not think they need to be all that similar. In one of Rand's examples he talked about in last weeks WBF he stated that he just did a blanket rel canonical on his old site to his new one and 2 days later everything was working as intended. When I went to check how he did it, it wasn't even specifically one page to another, he just added the rel canonical to the header file.
Your case is much more specific and involves doing it on on url only, not a whole domain. If I were in your position I would definitely give it a shot.
Quote from last weeks whiteboard friday :
The second example is even niftier and suggests some very cool applications as well, and so I want to point this one out. I was frustrated because for the last few years a very old domain that I created, I don't know, back in the late '90s, early 2000s, Randz.net was ranking really well for my name. I think it was ranking number 3 actually for my name, for Rand Fishkin in Google. I was always kind of frustrated because it's an old domain. I haven't updated in forever. I need to do the WordPress reinstall. I don't even know where the server login is. Whatever. It's kind of defunct at this point, and I haven't updated it in years. But I have this new blog, RandFishkin.com/blog. I really wish I could this one ranking because it has some good content on there, a bunch of posts that have been on Hacker News and some interesting things. It's much more current and updated. I do once a month at least put something new on there. So, what I did is I took very page in the header of the WordPress template, I took every page and I put a cross-domain rel=canonical to this URL. So every page at Randz.net now says canonical version is RandFishkin.com/blog. You know what happened? Two days, literally 48 hours, like the next time they crawled Randz.net, bang, RandFishkin.com/blog ranking number 3 for my name. It hadn't even ranked on page 1 or 2. I think it was on page 3 or 4 up until that point. So, just awesome to be able to put this, the page that I really want in the search results and kind of retire my old blog from being searchable.
-Rand Fishkin (Source)
-
Thanks for the response. Should I take that you advise against the utilizing the canonical tag for this scenario since you offered alternatives? Both of these alternatives make sense but I am not sure they are workable solutions within my site governance.
-
One option, aside from the canonical tag, is to put the new content on the old URL and add an archive tag to the older articles, like 10tr033-archive.cfm. Or, if that's not workable, create a new URL and 301 redirect all articles to that page and only ever keep your latest article there, but link to the older ones. By redirecting several articles to a new page and then linking out to the older ones from there on new URLs that new article page should out-rank all others and continue to do so as you update it.
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
-
Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?
If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert781 -
Rel=canonical on landing page question
Currently we have two versions of a category page on our site (listed below) Version A: www.example.com/category • lives only in the SERPS but does not live on our site navigation • has links • user experience is not the best Version B: www.example.com/category?view=all • lives in our site navigation • has a rel=canonical to version A • very few links and doesn’t appear in the SERPS • user experience is better than version A Because the user experience of version B is better than version A I want to take out the rel=canonical in version B to version A and instead put a rel=canonical to version B in version A. If I do this will version B show up in the SERPS eventually and replace version A? If so, how long do you think this would take? Will this essentially pass page rank from version A to version B
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate title while setting canonical tag.
Hi Moz Fan, My websites - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/ has run financial service, So our main keywords is about "Insurance" in Thai, But today I have an issues regarding to carnonical tag. We have a link that containing by https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance?showForm=1&brand_id=9&model_id=18&car_submodel_id=30&ci_source_id=rabbit.co.th&car_year=2014 and setting canonical to this url - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance within 5,000 items. But in this case I have an warning by site audit tools as Duplicate Page Title (Canonical), So is that possible to drop our ranking. What should we do, setting No-Index, No-Follow for all URL that begin with ? or keep them like that.
Technical SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
2 pages ranking for same keyword.. Need some advice on what to do.
Here's my question. When I first started my website we started Using keyword anchor building links To my homepage . Over the years Our business has expanded to more than just baby headbands. I now have a baby headband page. When tracking my rankings. I sometimes see Both pages in Google for the same keyword. Other days I do not see both of them. My question is Should I continue building links and keyword anchor text for the home page Or should I switch them and start building keyword-rich anchor text for my baby headband page. I'm just wondering if the Search engine is confused by the two. When searching for the keyword baby headbands. I will sometimes show up for eight and nine. 8 is my home page and 9 is for the baby headband page. I have always shown up for the keyword "baby Headbands" for my home page.
Technical SEO | | PB20070 -
Need help with rel canonical!
I have a client who's MOZ crawl is coming back with 62 "notices" about rel canonical. Is this bad? On the report, it lists the url, then "Tag Value" as the home page.....what does this mean exactly? Are they pointing all the pages to the home page? I think I have 301 and rel can confused....
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
How can I prevent duplicate content between www.page.com/ and www.page.com
SEOMoz's recent crawl showed me that I had an error for duplicate content and duplicate page titles. This is a problem because it found the same page twice because of a '/' on the end of one url. e.g. www.page.com/ vs. www.page.com My question is do I need to be concerned about this. And is there anything I should put in my htaccess file to prevent this happening. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onlineexpression
Karl0 -
Canonical tags
Hi there, I have just noticed that SEOmoz picked up some duplicates links that I would like to resolve but not sure how. For example, the "Finding work in the arts" article has two links: http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/finding-work-in-the-arts http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/finding-work-in-the-arts?utm_source=Website&utm_medium=Website&utm_content=Finding+work+in+the+arts&utm_campaign=Footer+Links Both links can be found on this page http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/industry-news-views/article/what-employers-are-looking-for (see attachment). Would automatically generated canonical tags by the CMS solve this issue? rmxiP
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0