Using unique content from "rel=canonical"ized page

[ipancake]

Hey everyone, I have a question about the following scenario:

Page 1: Text A, Text B, Text C

Page 2 (rel=canonical to Page 1): Text A, Text B, Text C, Text D

Much of the content on page 2 is "rel=canonical"ized to page 1 to signalize duplicate content. However, Page 2 also contains some unique text not found in Page 1.

How safe is it to use the unique content from Page 2 on a new page (Page 3) if the intention is to rank Page 3?

Does that make any sense?

[Milian]

Hey Mak,

One thing to bear in mind is that the canonical tag should be used on pages with the same content, if there is extra content on Page 2 that doesn't appear on Page 1, then Google could ignore the canonical tag al together:

_The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en_

[MikeRoberts]

Technically Page 1 would contain the subset of Page 2's superset except that Page 1 is likely older, ranking better and the page you want to keep so would take precedence. In which case Page 2's content would be considered as duplicating Page 1's superset of content and Page 2 should be canonicalized to Page 1. Of course, Rel=Canonical is a suggestion not a directive so the search engines reserve the right to not listen to it if they feel the tag isn't relevant.

The real question here would be why are you reusing all of that copy and would those pages be better served with more unique content instead of continuing to reuse and canonicalize?

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, I tend to agree with Maximilian and Mike - I'm not clear on the use-case scenario here and, technically, pages 1 and 2 aren't duplicated. Rel=canonical probably will still work, in most cases, and will keep page 2 from looking like a duplicate (and from ranking), but I'd like to understand the situation better.

If Google did honor the canonical tag on page 2, then the duplication between pages 2 and 3 shouldn't be a problem. I'm just thinking there may be a better way.