Thanks. If we don't plan on shortening our meta description displayed in SERPs, do we need to do anything with max snippet length? Is it only for people who want to shorten the description showed?

Thank you Daniel!

Regarding Google's new max-snippet:[number], this is specifically for the length of the meta description?

Also, does anyone know what the max character length is?

Thanks for the prompt reply, Martijn!

Hi Joe, see my respons to Martijn above and let me know if you need more clarification. Thanks.

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for your feedback. We have a ton of pages for media/news/PR on a subdomain but only have 50 pages that are used for sales. Do you think having control over crawl behavior will matter in this scenario? Our sales pages have no problems ranking.

Has anyone used Botify? Is this type of software necessary for a site with under 5K pages?

Assuming Google crawls the page, how long do you think it will take before we know whether Google is following canonical tags? By follow I mean whether they are following the signal and ranking the canonical link.

We requested crawling on all pages via google fetch.

How long on average does it take for a canonical tag to work? Understand that canonicals are just a suggestion, but after adding a canonical tag and submitting the page via Google fetch, assuming Google follows the canonical, would you expect it to work after a day or two or does it take longer?

We added canonicals to old PPC landing pages that are ranking organically, though our new landing pages (which we want to rank organically) are not identical and have a bit more content/features. They are similar though.

Canonicals were added to the old pages (pointing to new pages) and requested indexing via search console. Old pages are still ranking and new pages not so much.

FYI we are unable to 301 old PPC pages due to other non negotiable reasons unfortunately. Thanks.

I'm with you on using rel=canonical but the new pages are slightly different in that they have a lot more content for SEO purposes. The content definitely provides value to users but wondering if the extra content means Google will ignore canonical tag? Google mentions that canonical is good for duplicates where pages are very similar if not identical.

So we're also planning on A/B testing the original PPC pages. There are going to be 2 control pages vs 1 test (original URL). There are about 12 control pages.

Normally I would use rel=canonical for landing pages if the control page was actually ranking organically which is the case now but we're going to block them from search results when the new organic pages roll out. I'm assuming no indexing the test variations would be the best direction to take?

Yes, this is exactly what's happening

Yes, they don't want to change URLs in all their marketing campaigns (offline, email, social media, etc)

We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created.

We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale.

The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.

I believe it's a limitation of our CMS. I'll see if we can try it in htaccess or PHP. Thanks for the insight.

Thanks for the reply. Doesn't appear Google is recognizing the tag because duplicate pages with it are still showing up in SERPs.

Does Google recognize rel=canonical tag if loaded dynamically via javascript? Here's what we're using to load:

<script> //Inject canonical link into page head
    if (window.location.href.indexOf("/subdirname1") != -1) {
        canonicalLink = window.location.href.replace("/kapiolani", "");
    }
    if (window.location.href.indexOf("/subdirname2") != -1) {
        canonicalLink = window.location.href.replace("/straub", "");
    }
    if (window.location.href.indexOf("/subdirname3") != -1) {
        canonicalLink = window.location.href.replace("/pali-momi", "");
    }
    if (window.location.href.indexOf("/subdirname4") != -1) {
        canonicalLink = window.location.href.replace("/wilcox", "");
    }
    if (canonicalLink != window.location.href) {
        var link = document.createElement('link');
        link.rel = 'canonical';
        link.href = canonicalLink;
        document.head.appendChild(link);
    } script>