What to do with localised landing pages on listings website - Canonical question

[dogscatsandpets]

Hi

Run a pet listings website and we had tonnes of duplicate content that we have resolved. But not sure what to do with the localised landing pages.

We have everything pointing back back to the main listings URL http://www.dogscatsandpets.co.uk/for-sale-stud-and-adoption/ but haven't pointed the URLs that show pets for specific towns and cities eg http://www.dogscatsandpets.co.uk/for-sale/dogs-and-puppies/in-city-of-london/ back to the main url. Obviously this is giving us duplicate content issues, but these pages do rank in local search and drive traffic into the site.

So my question is should we canonicalise the local pages back to the main url and if we do will this mean our local landing pages will no longer rank? Is there any alternatives?

[RobCairns88]

Hi Calum,

Going the canonical route is typically meant as a short-term solution when a site is under maintenance - it normally isn't meant to be a long-term fix.

From what I understand, you have a number of localized landing pages for your services set up and they are bringing in traffic to your main page.

You don't want to redirect or create tags back to your home page from all of your local pages as this will create penalties with Google. Your best bet might be to incorporate your local pages into your site structure in a way that would permit them to be easily crawled (and therefore easy to access) rather than redirecting all traffic to your home page.

This is what I think you might be doing when you say "we have everything pointing back to our main URL" - it would be best to create new pages for redirects if this is indeed what you are doing.

Maybe give me some more information on the previous duplicate content, where you started and where you are now and I can create a more specific answer for you.

Rob

[dogscatsandpets]

Hi

Thanks for the quick reply. We used canonicals as a long term fix. We had duplicate content all over. You've get the url that displays every listing on the site that I posted above. Then unique URLs for different types of breed, URLs for listing type (for sale, stud, adoption) and location Etc. Obviously all these different URLs just created loads of duplicate content as one listing could appear in quite a few urls.

So we used canonical on everything to the url that displays all listings. Except for the localised URLs that we left as is. But moz sees these pages as duplicate content, as some listings appear in URLs for two locations depending on the postcode radius and all appear on the URL that displays every listing on the site.

Does tes that make things clearer at all?

[RuthBurrReedy]

Canonicalizing all these URLs back to your main page will drastically reduce the total number of pages that will drive any kind of traffic. At the very least, I would look at which type of URL is attracting the most organic traffic (location, listing type, breed, etc) and work to make these pages real landing pages for these search terms - other than the listings, what other information could you provide on these pages that would make them more unique? Striving to make the pages more unique from each other will give you more long-tail opportunity than canonizing everything back to the main page.

Ultimately, I recommend you rework your navigation using a combination of facets and filters, in order to reduce duplicate content while still having mid-tail level landing pages. Hannah Smith wrote a great piece for Moz on this a couple of years ago that's still useful today: http://moz.com/blog/information-architecture-faceted-navigation-duplicate-content-oh-my

[dogscatsandpets]

Hi Ruth, exactly the answer I was looking for, thank you. Great article by the way, we had already implemented a lot of what you covered there.

I guess my only problem would be finding unique content for localised landing pages. Breed specific landing pages (eg 'cocker spaniels for sale') will be fine as I can feature breed descriptions on these and the latest listings. But a little more difficult for the page 'puppies for sale in London' for example. Maybe I could feature some breeder profiles for that area.

Would you also recommend putting a no follow on the search results if we put these landing pages in?

[RuthBurrReedy]

I usually recommend noindexing search results pages, since Google has said they don't want "search results in their search results."

I was thinking about this this morning and I think one way to go would be to give advice on owning a dog in different areas of the city. For example you could say something like "In the City of London, the area is more urban and green spaces are fewer and far between. Dog owners in the City should expect to take their pups to a dog park for some regular exercise, and may want to consider smaller, lower-energy breeds who don't need as much time to run." Something like that. You could talk about nearby parks and dog-friendly attractions, endorse some local vets, list nearby pet hospitals, that sort of thing. It will take time to build out this content, but you can prioritize based on the existing organic traffic each page is getting, or start with your top converters and go from there.