How to deal with auto generated pages on our site that are considered thin content

[ChrissyOck]

Hi there,

Wondering how to deal w/ about 300+ pages on our site that are autogenerated & considered thin content. Here is an example of those pages: https://app.cobalt.io/ninp0

The pages are auto generated when a new security researcher joins our team & then filled by each researcher with specifics about their personal experience. Additionally, there is a fair amount of dynamic content on these pages that updates with certain activities.

These pages are also getting marked as not having a canonical tag on them, however, they are technically different pages just w/ very similar elements. I'm not sure I would want to put a canonical tag on them as some of them have a decent page authority & I think could be contributing to our overall SEO health.

Any ideas on how I should deal w/ this group of similar but not identical pages?

[Igor.Go]

If you don't want to remove these from index and want them to provide more value try adding more fields and up the requirements for the minimum amount of text in the description.

Moz's user profile page is a good example https://i.imgur.com/C4YR7AE.png
There's not exactly a lot of content, but every field is unique for every user

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hey!

My two cents are, just have them indexed by the search engine and put a canonical tag on it leading to themselves. I would definitely make the case for that these pages are unique enough that they're not seen as duplicates. Your problem is one that many sites have with some kind of dynamic pages. In the end an e-commerce site is barely any different, you have product data but the template remains the same and is totally something that you could optimize for.

So, they're all unique, let them point to themselves and try to improve them even more. Potentially you have a very rich data set here that you can leverage even more for SEO.

Martijn.

[ChrissyOck]

Thanks so much for this. I'm a little confused about pointing a canonical tag to itself. Is there any information on this you can send over that would help me understand? Or an example of what that tag would look like.

Thanks Martijn

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Why are you confused? It's totally normal to link a page to itself as the canonical. In the end most pages are the original of themselves.

Quoting this from the help center here at Moz: "It’s ok if a canonical tag points to the current URL. In other words, if URLs X, Y, and Z are duplicates, and X is the canonical version, it’s ok to put the tag pointing to X on URL X. This may sound obvious, but it’s a common point of confusion." - What is canonicalization?

[ChrissyOck]

I guess I just don't understand the purpose of doing that. If it's the original, why put the tag on it? What additional information is that tag providing? (I'm a novice here, and appreciate your help explaining )

[ChrissyOck]

Ahh, this helped answer my question: https://moz.com/community/q/rel-canonical-tag-back-to-the-same-page-the-tag-is-on

Thanks All. Going to mark this question as answered.