Canonical, 301 or code a workaround?
-
Hi,
Recently I've been trying to tackle an issue on one of my websites. I have a site with around 400 products and 550 pages total. I've been pruning some weaker pages and pages with shallow content, and it's been working really well.
My current issue is this: There are about 20 store brands of 6 products on my site that each have their own page. They are identical products just re-branded. Writing content for each of these pages has been difficult, as it's a fairly dry product too. So I have around 120 pages of dry content that is unique but not much different from one another. I want to consolidate but I am not sure how yet. Here is what I am thinking:
1. 301 - I pick one product page as the master, 301 all the other duplicate products to it and then make one page of great content that encompasses all of them. If the 301 juice gets diluted over time I might miss out on some long tails, but I could also gain a lot more from a great content page with 500+ words of really good content as opposed to pages with 150-250 words of just so so content.
2. Canonical - Similar to above. I pick a master page and canonical the other pages to it. Then I could use the great content on all the pages, and still have pages for the specific products. The pages might not show up in search engines but would still be searchable on my site.
3. Coded solution - In my CMS I could always make a workaround where the products still appear on the brands page (just their name with a link to the product page) but all the links direct to a master page.
I realize all the solutions are fairly similar, although I am not sure which is ideal. Option 3 is the most expensive/time consuming but it would drop my page total down to around 450 pages. For a while now (dating back to before Panda) I've been trying to get rid of the low quality and outdated product pages so I could focus on the more popular and active pages. Dropping my page total would also help in the SEO efforts as the sheer volume of pages that need links right now is high, and obviously the less pages I have the more time I can spend on each page (content and link building).
So what do you think? Should I do any of the 3, a combination of the 3 or something different?
Cheers,
Vinnie
-
Thanks for the quick reply. The pages aren't identical. I've managed to get 100-150 words of unique content for each but it's very dry and not great. I could certainly do better, but not on each page, only one or two.
I think I like the 301 idea. I 301 the pages, take the old ones down and bolster the content on the master page.
-
I agree with Steven, your best bet would be to canonical them all to the page with the best content.
-
Without actually seeing the site I would say that if you have product pages that are identical to canonical them to one main place. If they are listed in the SERPS 301 them if you are removing them. Even having a few different words can still show up as duplicate.The last CMS option might work, but again without seeing the site it is hard to judge.
Since I do a lot of url rewriting I ran into a similar issue and did 301's and canonical to the pages I wanted to show and things are much better.
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
-
Mass 301 redirect in htaccess
I use ScreamingFrog to generate sitemaps for my Magento 2 multistore, but I recently noticed two issues. Each category/page has two URLs. One with / and the end and one without. Every product has two URLs. One with /product-name and the other /shop/product-name. The URLs are canonicalised, but this is still a problem and I'm not sure exactly how to execute this in the htaccess file. So I need to: Remove all URLs without the / at the end and redirect them all to the URL with / at the end. Or vice versa. 301 redirect every single product (there are over 400) from shop/product-name to /product-name. How do I do this en mass in the htaccess file?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Dealing with Canonical tag in volusion
Hi We have an ecommerce site where we have some returns/scratch /dented products identical to the original one. The onpage content of the damaged/original is pretty much identical with the damaged just having a describing the damage. I had wanted to make a canonical tag on the damaged product to the original so it would not be a problem of duplicate content but as it is a volusion site we dont have that option - it only canonicalizes back to itself! Any ideas what else I can do - cant really change the content much and I dont really want to deindex it so people find it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henya0 -
What is the difference between link rel="canonical" and meta name="canonical"?
Hi mozzers, I would like to know What is the difference between link rel="canonical" and meta name="canonical"? and is it dangerous to have both of these elements combined together? One of my client's page has the these two elements and kind of bothers me because I only know link rel="canonical" to be relevant to remove duplicates. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
301 redirections done too late - What do you suggest?
Hi, When pushing our new site live, most of the 301 redirections got done too late for several reasons. Understandably, our site rankings in google have taken a hit now. So far we have just tried to perfectly optimize the pages that used to rank well (They weren't even optimized before and were still ranking) , to get our positions back. But does anyone have an idea about what else we could do? Is there a recommended "action plan" when someone is late with their 301 redirections?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
Canonicalization interact with 301 redirects?
This is a interesting one I think. I have recently taken down some product list pages from our website www.towelsrus.co.uk. These have canonicalisation in place to deal with pages where a query string is generated depending on the search criteria. When I put a 301 redirect in place the target page redirects fine, however webmaster tools then errors with 404 on all canonicalised pages. Is this correct behaviour and how do we get over this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
What happens with a 301 redirected page?
Hi All, What happens with an indexed page that I 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Is it removed from the Google index after a while? Thanks0 -
301 a page and then remove the 301
I have a real estate website that has a city hub page. All the homes for sale within a city are linked to from this hub page. Certain small cities may have one home on the market for a month and then not have any homes on the market for months or years. I call them "Ghost Cities". This problem happens across many cities at any point in time. The resulting city hub pages are left with little to no content. We are throwing around the idea of 301 redirecting these "Ghost City" pages to a page higher up in the hierarchy (Think state or county) until we get new homes for sale in the city. At that point we would remove the 301. Any thoughts on this strategy? Is it bad to turn 301s on and off like that? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisKolmar0