Can I use canonical tags to merge property map pages and availability pages to their counterpart overview pages?

[assertive-media]

I have a property website, for each property are 4-5 tabs each with their own URL, these pages include the overview page which is content rich, and auxilliary pages such as maps, availability, can I use a canonical tag to merge the tabs with very little content to their corresponding overview page which is content rich?

I.e.

www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview

This page has tabs for map, town info, availability which all have their own url i.e.

www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/map
www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability
www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/towninfo

Because these auxilary pages do not contain much content can I place a canonical tag in them pointing back to the content rich overview page at www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview?

[RyanKent]

In short, No.

Canonicals are designed to merge multiple URLs to the same page. For example if you have an "availability" page which can be sorted, your URLs might be:

www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability

www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability/

www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability/?sort_asc_field=price

www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability/?sorc_desc_field=price

Those four URLs all lead to the identical page. By using a canonical identifying "www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability" as your site's main page, it avoids confusion. All your link juice will apply to a single page, and Google will consistently direct users to the correct version of the page.

[assertive-media]

So, for the pages with little content, should I just nofollow them so that they are not a part of the indexed site structure? These pages have very little content i.e. the maps page, so should I just add an exclusion to the page or the robots.txt file

[RyanKent]

You could "noindex" them, which would mean search indexes would not list the content of those pages.

Keep in mind that Google doesn't penalize you for having little content, as long as it is unique. The challenge is found when you have a small amount of content wrapped in a page with a header, footer and sidebar with identical content as the rest of the site. If you do a word count you may find the overwhelming percent of that page's content is duplicate, which is a concern.

If you offered a blank page with a map that said "Map of 1000 block of Sesame Street taken January 2011" along with the image then you could index that page if you felt that might be something people might be interested in.

The determination you need to make is whether the content is of value to users. Is anyone likely to want to find these maps or other information directly from a search engine? If the answer is no, then it's fine to block them either in robots.txt or with a noindex tag.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'd just add that if the solution chosen is noindex, to do the noindex, follow method, just to give the extra cue if there are links on those pages.