Is my canonicalisation harmful?

[McCaldin]

Hi,

My site appears to be under a Google penalty.  We've had an SEO guy assess the site for us and the working hypothesis is that we are under a Panda penalty for duplicate content.  The site is 4 years old and we have never had any success in ranking well for just any none branded keywords. The vacation rental market is highly competitive and we have found ranking for relevant keywords extremely difficult.  For just about every keyword that i am tracking we are below 50.

We sell vacation rentals.  We have ~1500 rental listing pages.  Much of the descriptive text content for those pages has been taken from other vacation rental sites.  I should add that this same content is used by many vacation rental websites also; we're all trying to sell the same listings.  We have started rewriting the the text content for the listings but as there are 1500 of them it is a slow process.

We have listings in 26 different countries.  Each country has it's own landing page.

As an experiment our SEO guy recommended that we canonicalise each listing that belongs to a specific region towards it's regional landing page to see if we receive more direct traffic and begin to rank more highly for keywords.  So www.mydomain.com/villa-in-barbados-1, www.mydomain.com/villa-in-barbados-2, etc all point to www.mydomain.com/barbados as the canonical version of the content.

We haven't really seen much improvement in organic traffic and, although we are ranking for more branded keywords we are not seeing much elevation ranking for other keywords.

Is this the right way to go about it?  The content in the landing pages is significantly different from those pages that have been canonicalised towards them.

Cheers

[Mustansar]

Hi

In my opinion, first think you need to make sure your canonical tags are asp er required standard (Best Pracise for canonicalization).

The next step you must update content again and wait to be index by search engines. We have similar situation earlier last year. It took little time but we got our client site back to track.

Bear in mind, you all landing pages must be unique specially vila's description pages.

[McCaldin]

Hi Ikkie,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  My canonical tags are semantically correct and the pages towards which they point are unique.  I should probably rephrase my question.  Does it matter that the pages towards which the villa listings are canonicalised are significantly different from the villa/product pages that point to them?

My understanding is that the purpose canonicalisation is to alert search engines to the fact that there are multiple versions of the same content and that a particular page of content should be regarded as the authoritative version.  In my case; the content pages that are canonicalised are quite different from the product pages that point towards it.  In this case; would Google pay attention to the canonical tag?

[gfiorelli1]

Yes, it is an important thing to consider, because Googlers repeatedly told that if the canonicalized page and the canonical are very different, then Google may not take into account the canonicalization.