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 For a while now (dating back to before Panda) I've been trying to get rid of the low quality and outdated product pages so I could focus on the more popular and active pages.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
-
Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages
The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan0 -
Is Google ignoring my canonicals?
Hi, We have rel=canonical set up on our ecommerce site but Google is still indexing pages that have rel=canonical. For example, http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/novelty.html?colour=7883&p=3&size=599 http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/novelty.html?p=4&size=599 http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/children.html?colour=7886&mode=list These are all indexed but all have rel=canonical implemented. Can anyone explain why this has happened?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr0 -
Circular Canonical/Redirect
My client's site has an issue (see below) and I'm wondering how much it could be affecting crawlability. Has anyone seen a major rankings bump after fixing something like this? 1. In each page the rel=canonical is pointing to the http version of the page while the http version is redirecting to the https version. Basically, a circular redirect-canonical loop is occurring.2. The sitemap.xml is also referring to the http version of the pages rather than the https.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elenaroi0 -
Htaccess 301 regex question
I need some help with a regex for htaccess. I want to 301 redirect this: http://olddomain.com/oldsubdir/fruit.aspx to this: https://www.newdomain.com/newsubdir/FRUIT changes: different protocol (http -> https) add 'www.' different domain (olddomain and newdomain are constants) different subdirectory (oldsubdir and newsubdir are constants) 'fruit' is a variable (which will contain only letters [a-zA-Z]) is it possible to make 'fruit' UPPER case on the redirect (so 'fruit' -> 'FRUIT') remove '.aspx' I think it's something like this (placed in the .htaccess file in the root directory of olddomain): RedirectMatch 301 /oldsubdir/(.*).aspx https://www.newdomain.com/newsubdir/$1 Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scanlin0 -
What if a 301 redirect is removed?
Suppose the following scenarios after a 301 redirects from source URL to targent URL is removed. 1. If source URL raises a 404 error, will target URL retained the link juice previously passed from source URL? 2. If source URL starts to show different content than what is showing on target URL, will the previously passed link juice be credited back to the source URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
301 redirect subdomain to path and 301 for popular pages
We have very popular pages that have many backlinks. www.chezmaya.com/jeux/game33.htm have so many backlinks and it's very popular. Now If i'm moving this page to a new path like : http://www.chezmaya.com/jeux/component/mtree/Défouloir/Game33/details.html with a 301. Your SEOmoz toolbar is now giving a very low PA:1 and mR:0.00 for this new page. My question is after you crawl my site again would you change the values to what /jeux/game33.htm got before ? We used to have jeux.chezmaya.com and moved to www.chezmaya.com/jeux/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SocialGeekMedia
Same here PA:1 and mR:0.00 for this page. Also Matt Cutts say that Google does transfer the juice from the old page to the new one. I already saw one url changed in a search for puzzle, it's at the same position it was before, but it say's 6 days ago beside. So I wonder if this is temporary and it will move with time? Thanks0 -
Site to Check Code (HTML) and (CSS)
Hi, Iwas wondering what sites you use to check if your website has clean HTML & CSS code. I know there are many for load time. I remember coming across one that checked HTML and CSS and also listed the errors. Thanks in advance for any input Jimmy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmy02250 -
Filter after 301 and linked with high PR
Hi, I'd like to ask you what should I do in my situation. I've shorted my URLs from something like this: domain.com/module/action/type/id/keyword to this: domain.com/keyword After 301 SERP refreshed and position stayed the same (yea, lucky me :). After 2 days I got some hight PR links (4 and 5). After 8 days my new URL disapprear to one keyword. Now this take 6 days... I've removed these links and still no results. So the question is - what should I do? Remove new url and replace it with old one, get new links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sui0