Do different meta titles & descriptions delete the canonical origin?

[heckert]

Hi,

hopefully anyone knows something about this case:

There is a canonical tag on site "www.xyz.com**/de_de/" **refering to site "www.xyz.com/de-de/".

If the meta title and descriptions are different on both sides - is there a problem that google will not pay attention to the canonical tag?

Do both sides need the same title and canonical?

Thanx for your answers!

Cheers Heiko!

[Alex-Harford]

Even if the content on two different pages is identical, there's always a chance Google will not honour the canonical (though this is rare in my experience).

To use rel="canonical" the majority of the content on both pages should be the same, so if only the title and meta description are different it shouldn't matter.

Ideally you should 301 (permanent) redirect one of the pages to the other, if possible. Is there any particular reason you have the two pages?

Further information on rel="canonical": http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

I hope that helps.