Canonical Tag Question Regarding Two State Pages

[LindsayE]

Hi Moz Fam!

Question... we have two pages for each state. Both pages are used in our PPC campaigns. One of the two state pages is fully optimized for organic search. The page that's optimized for organic has 1,500-2,000 words, the other one has thin content. All the content is unique, nothing duplicate. We call one set of state pages that I optimized my SEO state pages, then the other ones are our PPC state pages.

Should I be setting a canonical tag to one of these pages to let Google know which one is the "master" page? (My SEO state page is the master) I've never used them, so I'm not sure what the right answer is for this.

Thanks!

[GastonRiera]

HI Lindsay,

Yes, you should set a canonical tag to the optimized page.
Remember not to block from crawling nor noindexing those PPC (to be canonicalized) pages.

Best luck!
GR

[tcope25]

You should have rel=canonical tags on your SEO state pages and noindex your PPC state landing pages.

[GastonRiera]

Please dont apply canonical and noindex on the same page. This could lead to noindexation for the latter page

[tcope25]

I wasn't suggesting to include both on the same page. Thanks!

[GastonRiera]

I dind say you were. Just thought needed to be clarified

[LindsayE]

Okay, will the noindex impact our PPC ads? I'm guessing not...

What if I only applied the rel=canonical tags to the SEO state pages and left the PPC pages alone? I saw that you can apply a rel=canonical tag in SEO Yoast, but I don't know how to structure it.

[GastonRiera]

No, noindex will not impact PPC ads.

Leaving PPC pages alone will produce a poor user experience whether found searching in google. That´s one of the reasons why i´d suggest to canonicalize all those pages into the one matching the user intent.

If your PPC pages are also in wordpress and you have advanced setting allowed (from YOAST) for your profile, then you can set the canonical URL in the bottom of the edition page. In the advanced menu.
It looks like the image attached.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR

8jykl1k

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Lindsay,

You'll want to apply a canonical tag to the PPC pages, pointing to the equivalent SEO page as the canonical version. You may also want to apply a self-referencing canonical tag to your SEO pages - this would be a canonical tag on the page that lists that same page as the canonical version, essentially saying "this page right here is the canonical page."

Tcope25 above is correct that, if you wanted to, you could noindex your PPC landing pages - and Gaston is correct that you would want to implement either a canonical tag or a noindex tag, but not both (there should be no impact on your PPC landing pages either way, it's very common for PPC landing pages to be noindexed). If you apply the canonical tag correctly, however, you shouldn't need to noindex the PPC landing pages. I hope that helps!

[LindsayE]

Thank you very much! I'll apply the canonical tag to the PPC pages and leave them to stay indexed. They do rank organically for a few keywords and gets leads, so I don't want to lose that. Is the Canonical URL just the "SEO" state page URL that I'm optimizing and want it to point too?