How to associate content on one page to another page

[Viewpoints]

Hi all,

I would like associate content on "Page A" with "Page B".  The content is not the same, but we want to tell Google it should be associated. Is there an easy way to do this?

[GPainter]

Can you go a bit more in depth ? IS there a reason why you can't just link the two sites ?

[Viewpoints]

Well it's not 2 sites, it's two pages. So it's a read more page and a full content page. We want Google to index the full content page, so that it's there, but we want our users to go to the page with the "read more" first, before they see that full content page.

So we would like Google to associate the full content page with the read more page, so that the read more page comes up before the full content page.

Thanks!

[GPainter]

Sounds like a job for rel=canonical

You can also submit a sitemap to help Google index.

I would be careful not to make it look like cloaking as that can be bad. You could have the snippet with a read more link and put the read more on the robots.

Couple of idea's for you there. Hope they help.

[Viewpoints]

I thought rel=canonical might be the answer, but from my understanding of it, I thought if we put this on the top of Page B, then Google would ignore the content on Page B and just associate any "link juice" etc on Page B with Page A.

[And we really want to make sure the Google indexes the content on Page B. Any ideas?

Am I misunderstanding rel=canonical?](PageA)

[GPainter]

The problem you may have is duplicate content it's kinda trying to have your cake and eat it unfortunately.  You could try to manually index the site but it is a bit of a predicament your in.  The next option is you wait and both the pages will get indexed eventually or via a sitemap on webmaster tools. As mentioned would have a slight concern for duplicate content.

More info on canonical

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, I'm afraid Chris is right. There's really no way to tell Google to index both pages but then not give them control over which one ranks. Google is naturally going to prefer the full content page, because they want to get people to the best "answer", in a sense.

Truthfully, I think it's a better search user experience, in most cases. Internal search users can travel from the snippet to the post, but search users may get frustrated at going from Google's results to your results, and not straight to the resource. If you force the first step on search users, you may actually increase your bounce rate and harm your overall performance.