Reducing pages with canonical & redirects

[trentc]

We have a site that has a ridiculous number of pages. Its a directory of service providers that is organized by city and sub-category of the vertical. Each provider is on the main city page, then when you click on a category, it will only show those folks who offer that subcategory of this service.

example:

• colorado/denver - main city page
• colorado/denver/subcat1 - subcategory page

There are 37 subcategories. So, 38 pages that essentially have the same content - minus a provider or two - for each city.

There are approx 40K locations in our database. So rough math puts us at 1.5 million results pages, with 97% of those pages being duplicate content!

This is clearly a problem. But many of these obscure pages do rank and get traffic. A fair amount when you aggregate all these pages together.

We are about to go through a redesign and want to consolidate pages so we can reduce the dupe content, get crawl budget allocated to more meaningful pages, etc.

Here's what I'm thinking we should do with this site, and I would love to have your input:

1. Canonicalize

Before the redesign use the canonical tag on all the sub-category pages and push all the value from those pages (colorado/denver/subcat1, /subcat2, /subcat3... etc) to the main city page (colorado/denver/subcat1)

2. 301 Redirect

On the new site (we're moving to a new CMS) we don't publish the duplicate sub-category pages and do 301 redirects from the sub-category URLs to the main city page urls.

We'd still have the sub-categories (keywords) on-page and use some Javascript filtering to narrow results.

We could cut to the chase and just do the redirects, but would like to use canonicalization as a proof of concept internally at my company that getting rid of these pages is a good thing, or at least wont have a negative impact on traffic. i.e. by the time we are ready to relaunch traffic and value has been transfered to the /state/city page

Trying to create the right plan and build my argument. Any feedback you have will help.

[DavidKauzlaric]

Your plan sounds good but here are a few things I'd like to add.

1. Make sure the dupe pages you're getting rid of are not the main traffic sources. If that is the case you'll want to redirect only a few at a time and slowly go around fixing that. You don't want to switch to new CMS, throw up redirects, and lose 85% of your traffic. Just make sure it's not your main traffic source.

2. Make sure you use the proper methods of canonicalization. Don't half-ass it.

3. On the new site, because you have a large and deep site, make sure you have a proper sitemap generated fresh all the time and that the proper weights are assigned and proper structuring. Less levels = better.

4. Watch your Webmaster Tools.

That is all I have, I think you'll be fine.

[trentc]

awesome feedback! thanks david. would like to hear your thoughts on proper canonicalization when you have a moment. thanks again.

[DavidKauzlaric]

The best way is to make sure you're using the tag properly and that you have all your angles covered.

There is actually some good posts on SEOmoz about canonicalization, I'll try and find those for you.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!