When to use canonical urls

[propertyhunter]

I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls.

I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not.

I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page.

Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page?

Thanks

Paul

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Paul

Hmmm, that might work, but really, that is far from the ideal approach here and it might make sense to try and understand what is causing that page to rank over the homepage.

Have you checked

1. keywords targeted on each page
2. optimisation of pages for keyword
3. internal anchor text (navigation + pages)
4. External links

Planning and consistency is just so important that I would recommend trying to get a handle on why one page over another is ranking rather than just trying to put a hack in place to try and redirect folks to the right page.

Canonical is really for clearing up any uncertainty regarding different URLs for a single page. So, if you have.

www.yoursite.co.uk/blog
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog/
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog/index.html

You could set the canonical to the one your prefer and then any links or search results would be allocated to the correct varation. It is not really for saying one page is really a copy of another but it can be used like that if there are near duplicates but really noindex may be a better solution for non search based landing pages that are very close in content to another page.

As ever, there are lots of moving parts and without an example it's hard to say but in principle, I would try to figure out what is going on here and adjust the pages + set up canonical as they should be used.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Some useful references
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps 

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

[donford]

Hello,

That is not the purpose of the canonical tag. You should not attempt to use canonical tag to fix this sort of problem. The general purpose of the canonical tag is to filter dynamic urls to a single root page.

Example

www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=XL&color=Red
www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=L&color=Red
www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=XL&color=Blue

Canonical to www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face

In this example the only difference of these pages is the size & color selected. The page is the same, the parameters are different. So by putting a canonical tag on this page, you help the search engine filter out the dynamic urls and rank the canonical tag.

It sounds like you may have an issue with Keyword Cannibalization, or it could simply be that your inner page is much better for the keyword then the homepage.

I'm sure somebody here would be happy to assist you further if we could take a look at the 2 pages in question and the exact keyword that you're using in Google.

Hope this helps

[propertyhunter]

Thanks for the replies, that has really cleared it up, I think I just need to look deeper into the pages layout to see exactly why Google is deciding to rank this particular page.

Thanks

Paul

[Dr-Pete]

Thumbing up both answers - I think they've got you covered. This is definitely a situation where you should try to sort out why the deeper page is ranking. It could be a positive that you should try to encourage (disrupting that could harm your ranking, ultimately) or it could signal something about your home-page that needs work.

Rand had a good post a while back on the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions