Canonicals Url question

[NerdsOnCall]

I manage a computer repair company website, www.callnerds.com One of our main marketing strategies are blog articles and press releases to newspappers.

Because of this, we have a subfolder for the author of the newspaper articles who is becoming well known, and we wanted a place for people to connect with her personally.  on this site callnerds.com/andrea We only publish articles that Andrea writes.

Then on the blog we publish all of the articles, including articles that andrea writes, in addition to articles written by everyone else on our staff.

i would like suggestions on wether a canonical link on the /andrea site should be used. the canonical link wold point to our blog. Her site is starting to get high quality links from newspapers and magazines, however all of the content on the site is duplicate content of the same article on our blog. Any thoughts?

[john4math]

It does appear that some of the posts are duplicate content, so you should use the canonical tag on those pages. For example, you serve the same post under http://callnerds.com/andrea/understanding-verizons-tiered-data-plans/ and http://www.callnerds.com/blog/att-and-verizon-tiered-data-plans-7132011/.  I would suspect you'd want the main blog to get the link juice and appear in search results, so you'd want to place a canonical tag on the /andrea/ version pointing to the /blog/ version.  I would imagine all her posts duplicate posts on the main blog, so you should add it to all of them.

Andrea's page, http://callnerds.com/andrea/, doesn't appear to be duplicate content of the main blog page http://www.callnerds.com/blog/, so I wouldn't add the canonical tag to that page.  I don't think the content between the two pages is similar enough that the search engines would respect the tag anyway.  That's good anyway, because you want her page to rank when people are looking for her posts.

[oznappies]

That would be desirable, so you do not get any dupe content penality. It is then a question of which way you prefer the juice to flow. If Andrea's page is more targetted and getting the links, then rel canonical links from the blog to those pages may be more benificial.

[NerdsOnCall]

Thanks for the input guys. I'm going to point the link towards our blog for now.

-Bryant