Using the Canonical Tag

[andresgmontero]

Hi, I have an issue that can be solve with a canonical tag, but I am not sure yet, we are developing a page full of statistics, like this:

1. www.url.com/stats/

But filled with hundreds of stats, so users can come and select only the stats they want to see and share with their friends, so it becomes like a new page with their slected stats:

2. www.url.com/stats/?id=mystats

The problems I see on this is:

All pages will be have a part of the content from the main page 1) and many of them will be exactly the same, so: duplicate content.

My idea was to add the canonical tag of "www.url.com/stats/" to all pages, similar as how Rand does it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

But I am not sure of this solution because the content is not exactly the same, page 2) will only have a part of the content that page 1) has, and in some cases just a very small part.

Is the canonical tag useful in this case?

Thank you!

[ninjamarketer]

As a standard practice, a webpage will not be considered duplicate if the content is 60% unique. However, having a "id" tag on the indexed pages is not a good user experience and Google certainly will not like too many pages will the id tags.

Here are three options that you can follow -

1. Go to "Parameter handling" in Site configuration settings in Google webmaster tools for your website and add "id" as on of the parameter. There is a good chance that Google will read this and ignore all the pages on your site with the parameter "id". We have tested this and found to be successful for ton of the parameters we use on our website including campaign tracking codes.

2. Continue using rel canonicals for duplicate pages so Google bot may not index it.

3. Make changes to your site code to each time a user creates a new page it will be created as a seperate url without any "id" parameter (similar to url shortners like bit.ly). This will allow you to tap in the UGC easily.

Thanks

Sameer

[andresgmontero]

thank you Sameer, thank you Peter, very useful!