Rel=canonical for similar (not exact) content?

[dgibbons]

Hi all,

We have a software product and SEOMOZ tools are currently reporting duplicate content issues in the support section of the website.

This is because we keep several versions of our documentation covering the current version and previous 3-4 versions as well.

There is a fair amount of overlap in the documentation.  When a new version comes out, we simply copy the documentation over, edit it as necessary to address changes and create new pages for the new functionality.

This means there is probably an 80% or so overlap from one version to the next. We were previously blocking Google (using robots.txt) from accessing previous versions of the sofware documentation, but this is obviously not ideal from an SEO perspective.

We're in the process of linking up all the old versions of the documenation to the newest version so we can use rel=canonical to point to the current version.

However, the content isn't all exact duplicates.  Will we be penalized by Google because we're using rel=canonical on pages that aren't actually exact duplicates?

Thanks,

Darren.

[NakulGoyal]

Darren, nopes. You should be good doing this. You are essentially doing a 301 redirect and you are trying to tell that (current) page is the most important / most relevant page and that's the information/directive that Google is seeking from the Webmaster.

Just do it.