Canonical

[gmk1567]

I am seeing canonical implementation in many sites for non identical pages.

Google honoring these implementation and didn't have any issue.

Did anyone have different experience?

Thanks.

[SimonCullum]

Hi there,

With regards to the Canonical tag, pages don't need to be identical, just similar. Therefore Google usually follows the Canonical request whenever the two pages concerned are 'similar enough', with enough not really being known exactly however likely to be over 50% the same.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

[gmk1567]

Thanks Simon.

I should have added this scenario as well in my question.

For example think about the paginated pages where each page will have totally different content.

If canonical is there in the subsequent pages pointing back to the first page?

Thanks.

[SimonCullum]

Ok.  If a page has totally different content to any other page on the website, then a Canonical tag won't be appropriate. In this situation, use a NoIndex tag on the page and/or disallow it in the robots.txt file (only if you don't want any visitors to find it through search that is).

Or alternatively don't do anything, it sounds like the pages have some unique useful content on them  

[Dr-Pete]

Pagination is tough, and Google has sent really mixed signals. They seem to suggest one of two approaches:

(1) Use the new rel=prev/rel=next tags (tricky to implement, and Bing doesn't honor them, but they do seem to work)

(2) Rel-canonical to a "View All" page from paginated results (pages 2+)

Adam Audette did a great post recently on pagination:

http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494

To Simon's comment, I've also had decent luck using META NOINDEX,FOLLOW on pages 2+ (although I'd definitely recommend that before Robots.txt). The only issue is if people are linking to those search pages - that's pretty rare, though. All in all, paginated search results have very little SEO value.