Canonical tags for duplicate listings

[iQi]

Hi there,

We are restructuring a website. The website originally lists jobs that will have duplicate content. We have tried to ask the client not to use duplicates but apparently their industry is not something they can control.

The recommendations I had is to have categories (which will have the idea description for a group of jobs), and the job listing pages.

The job listing pages will then have canonical tags pointing to the category page as the primary URL to be indexed.

Another opinion came from a third party that this can be seen as if we are tricking Google and would get penalised, **Is that even true? **Why would Google penalise for this if thats their recommendations in the first place?

This third party suggested using nofollow on the links to these listings, or even not not index them all together.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

Issa

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Issa,

There are actually very few reasons to noindex / nofollow pages these days as most issues can be handed though 301 or canonical, so if there is an option that allows this, do it.

From what you are saying, and as long as I am understanding correctly, this is just like an e-commerce site that has page 1, page 2, page 3, etc of the same product, and they all rel=canonical back to Page 1 - which is the right thing to do.

This tells Google that you know there is duplications and not to pay any attention to them, so while they are open for Google to see, it means that you won't get penalised.

So you have Job 1, Job 2, Job 3, etc, with a rel=canonical back to Job 1.

Here is a little extra reading from Google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

I hope that helps?

-Andy

[MikeRoberts]

I agree with Andy.

In this case, there is no real reason to NoIndex/NoFollow these pages. Using rel=canonical makes sense... they provide a service and need to exist since they are individual job listings but leaving them as duplicates will hurt the site in the long run. So using a canonical to point at a Category page one level up in the site's navigation is perfectly acceptable and, from what I've seen, one of the more common uses of the canonical tag.

It's important to remember that a canonical is only a suggestion. It is possible for the spiders to decide not to respect the canonical tag if it appears to be used for manipulative purposes or if it appears that the pages are not relevant to each other. I don't believe that should be an issue in the case but its something to keep your eye on for a little while after implementing the tags.

[iQi]

Andy, than you very much for confirming that canonical are better than noindex in this case.

Best,

Issa

[iQi]

Thank you Mike,

It helps to have two experts agreeing with me. And you are absolutely right regarding misusing the canonical tags. I will keep an eye on it for sure.

Best,
Issa

[Andy.Drinkwater]

You're very welcome

-Andy