2 Similar Pages

[torontojon]

Hello,

I have two very similar pages. The first page is an apartment rental page with a map, rental listings and some neighborhood data below. The neighborhood data includes useful info about the area with photos, text about the area, crime rates, avg. rental rates, etc. The second page is a neighbourhood guide that includes virtually the same data as the rental page, but in longer form ie. more photos, more text, etc.

I want the rental page to rank, while ranking the neighborhood page is not important as it would be used more for link bait. But since the information on the two pages is the same, I don't want them to compete with each other.

I'm thinking of putting a cannonical tag on the neighborhood page pointing back to the rental page. Is that the correct thing to do in this instance?

Thanks for your help.

J

[davebuts]

Hi Jon,

A canonical tag can be used as you described, but you may have issues in your case.

The issue is that search engines treat canonical tags as a recommendation, not a directive. Meaning that they can choose to ignore the canonical tag if they think it's not appropriate.

In your case, if the canonicalized (link bait) page is getting more external links than the other page, it could increase the chance of the canonical tag being ignored because search engines might see it as the better page.

I think it would be best to have a single, high-quality page, but if you absolutely must keep the pages separate, use the canonical tag and see how things go.

Cheers,

David

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Jon,

Use of the canonical tag in this situation is just what it is intended for. Have a quick read of what Google says in these situations:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

• Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD get consolidated with links tohttps://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html.

While Google do say it is a recommendation, I find that in situations like this, it will work just fine for you. As David said, give it a go, but I can't see that you will have any problems. Google is pretty good at sorting these issues out, and especially so if you tell them which is your preferred page for ranking:

"While we encourage you to use any of these methods, none of them are required. If you don't indicate a canonical URL, we'll identify what we think is the best version or URL."

-Andy

[Linda-Vassily]

The other question is how will the "link bait" page be found by potential linkers? It won't show up in search anymore, if you point a canonical to the other page. [Maybe it is just very easy to find from another popular page on your site, which is easily findable?]