Tags: 301 Redirect, Rel Canonical, or Leave Them Alone?

[Humanovation]

The title is pretty self explanatory ... we have cornerstone pages ( such as a page for "Widget A") that rank for a certain keyword and then relevant articles that all link to that particular cornerstone page.  Each of those articles  has the same tag ("Widget A") to tie them together.  If you click on that tag, it creates a list of all articles with that tag.  We think that this may be siphoning off some of that keyword Google Juice from our Widget A cornerstone page.

Our question is, should we 301 redirect that tag to point to the Widget A cornerstone page, use a rel canonical pointing to the Widget A cornerstone page, or just leave it alone like we are doing now?  Our goal is to have the Widget A cornerstone page receive the most Google Juice possible and not be diminished by the tags.

Note* - We don't want to stop Google from crawling the tags because some of our tags rank highly for other keywords.  Also, we tried 301 redirecting the tags before and our ranking dropped significantly ... however, we made a lot of site changes at the same time so we are not sure if the drop in rank was due to redirecting the tags or the site changes.

Help please ... thanks in advance

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hey Patrick

From the sounds of things, you don't really have an issue here at the moment. If you're Widget A page is ranking for relevant keywords to that page and non of your article pages are ranking for searches you wish the cornerstone page to rank for, then you don't need to do any of the above. Since the content (I am assuming) for these articles are not the same as the cornerstone page, you don't really need to do any of the above.

Just so I can make sure I am understanding - does this happen?
http://www.example.com/widget-a
(click tag)
http://www.example.com/widget-a/article

If that's the case, then again, since "article" would have different content than widget-a, you don't need to redirect or canonicalize. I would actually view this as an opportunity for content around widget-a for benefits, questions, updates, uses, etc. which I am sure is what you would be doing.

Let me know if I am understanding this correctly. Hope this helps!

[Humanovation]

Thanks for the response Patrick!

Not exactly ... what is happening is:
http://www.example.com/widget-a-article
(click tag)
http://www.example.com/tag/widget-a (this generates a list of all articles with the relevant tag and a summary of each article)

What I'm wondering is whether I should use a 301 redirect on the tag to make it go:
http://www.example.com/widget-a-article
(click tag)
http://www.example.com/widget-a (the cornerstone page)

(instead of)
http://www.example.com/tag/widget-a (the summary tag page)

Is the summary tag page that is created by clicking the tag siphoning of Google Juice from the cornerstone page?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hey again!

I see now - thanks for clearing that up.

Depending on your organic traffic to those /tag/widget-a pages and user engagement from search on those pages (which I highly doubt you have much), I would leave them as they are, but "noindex,follow" them. Reason being, those tags can help users if they are looking for something specific, rather than being redirected to the cornerstone page, and having to look through the articles listed to find what they want. This can create a confusing user experience. Keep it easy for them.

The reason you should "noindex,follow" them, they aren't useful to search engines but you still want the equity moving through the site to follow links on those pages so that equity can continue to move.

Either way, I doubt search engines are giving weight to those tag pages as opposed to your cornerstone page.

Hopefully this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or comments!