Proper use and coding of rel = "canonical" tag

jeffreytrull1

I'm working on a site that has pages for many wedding vendors. There are essentially 3 variations of the page for each vendor with only slightly different content, so they're showing up as "duplicate content" in my SEOmoz Campaign. Here's an example of the 3 variations:

http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161

http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=messageWrite

http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=writeReview

Because of this, we placed a rel="canoncial" tag in the second 2 pages to try to fix the problem. However, the coding does not seem to validate in the w3 html validator. I can't say I understand html well enough to understand the error the validator is pointing out.

We also added a the following to the second 2 types of pages

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Am I employing this tag correctly in this case? Here is a snippet of the code below.

<html>
<head>

	<title>Reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MAtitle>
	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="[/includes/style.css](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/includes/style.css)">
<link href="[http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161)" rel="canonical" />

<script src="[http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js](view-source:http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js)" type="text/javascript">script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-173959-2";
urchinTracker();
script>

head>

sesertin

The canonical code is ok, but the with robots noindex it won't work. You cannot redirect something that is not indexed. Move robots tag and you shall be fine.

jeffreytrull1

Are you saying that I should remove the robots noindex tag altogether? If I do that, the pages with the canonical code will still show up in G, right?

If yes, Is there any alterative if I don't want that to happen?

Thanks for the help!

sesertin

No, if you remove it page will not show up as canonical element indicates to google that you do not want the page it is paleced on to rank, but it is still able to pass link juice. It is like a 301 redirect, with the difference that users are still able to read the pae content on the sepcific url. Here's a video by Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM

jeffreytrull1

Thanks for your help, I get it now!

In addition to your video, I also found a post on Matt Cutts' blog that answers it:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

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Proper use and coding of rel = "canonical" tag

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