Rel=Canonical For Landing Pages

[SoulSurfer8]

We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created.

We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale.

The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.

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[Packaging-Group]

The canonical option would be the route I went with in this scenario.

If you are going to noindex them, make sure that you audit the pages to see what links are pointing to the pages. If there is value them, canonicalization would be a better approach.

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[Alick300]

Hi,

In my view add content in existing PPC page which is ranking in search results and ask PPC team to create a new landing page.

PPC campaign performance won't be derailed by having a new landing page

Hope it helps!!!

Thanks

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[SoulSurfer8]

Yes, they don't want to change URLs in all their marketing campaigns (offline, email, social media, etc)

[SoulSurfer8]

Yes, this is exactly what's happening

[SoulSurfer8]

So we're also planning on A/B testing the original PPC pages. There are going to be 2 control pages vs 1 test (original URL). There are about 12 control pages.

Normally I would use rel=canonical for landing pages if the control page was actually ranking organically which is the case now but we're going to block them from search results when the new organic pages roll out. I'm assuming no indexing the test variations would be the best direction to take?

[SoulSurfer8]

I'm with you on using rel=canonical but the new pages are slightly different in that they have a lot more content for SEO purposes. The content definitely provides value to users but wondering if the extra content means Google will ignore canonical tag? Google mentions that canonical is good for duplicates where pages are very similar if not identical.