Do pages with canonicals need meta data?

[Shirley.Fenlason]

Page A has a canonical to Page B. Should Page A have meta data values such as description, keywords, dublin core values, etc.? If yes, should the meta data values be different on Page A and Page B?

[dohertyjf]

Hey Shirley -

Thanks for the question! Short answer is no - the information does not have to be different. What should happen with a canonical is that the search engines will see the canonical and apply the ranking for Page A to Page B.

However, the search engines do tell us that a canonical is a suggestion and that they do not always respect it if they think it was either a) done in error or b) is being done to manipulate. So, assuming Page B really is a duplicate of or a better version of Page A, yet you want to keep Page A around for some reason (PPC landing page or other), then the meta info will likely be similar anyways.

Finally, if you are canonicalling Page A to Page B, make sure that Page A is not in your XML sitemaps!

Good luck!

John