Canonical efficiency

[Pherogab]

Hi,

I'm creating recommendations for one of my client's site. It's a news site highly based on a regional aspect.

One of the main features would be that you can navigate on a high level, we call it inter-regional (with all the regions news) and on the regional level (with only news related to the region) which act as a filter which means that most of my content will be duplicate.

To allow the user to navigate the site on the two levels means that all the news pages will be duplicated, one with the inter-regional URL and one with the regional URL.

Example:

http://www.sitename.com/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article

http://www.sitename.com/region-name/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article

The regional URL is the official one, since it has all the keywords I want, and I'm planning to have a canonical on both version with the regional URL.

Is there a risk that this would affect my ranking? Any alternatives?

I read that I could prevent SE to crawl inter-regional articles using my robot.txt but I'm not fond of that.

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

If you implement the design you shared then the canonical tag is the preferred solution and is far superior to the robots.txt idea. A robots.txt block should only be used if there is no other alternative.

As far as other ideas, I am not clear on why you are using this type of dual design. For example purposes, I will use "Western US" as the large region, and California as the smaller region. If your URLs were /western-us/california then that url could be used in both instances. When a user navigated your /western-us category they could see all the /western-us news from California, Oregon, Washington, etc. and the URLs could be as described above /region/sub-region.

[Pherogab]

Thanks for you answer Ryan.

I should specify a bit more the purpose of the site. It will aggregate stories created on regional newspapers. The inter-regional part will be managed by an editor who will choose the stories that will show up. Same thing on the regional level.

The problem comes from the dual navigation. We want to allow people to navigation on a higher lever instead of forcing them to be on the regional level as soon as they click a link.

Example:

You are on Western US page because you are interested in what happen in this region. You find an interesting article written by a local newspaper in California.

If we send him to the regional version of the article all the navigation will switch the a regional navigation. Meaning that all the categorie links (like politics) will send him to a list of California politics articles instead of sending him to the Western US politics section.

Am I clear in my explanations?

I'm thinking a cookie based navigation could work but again not sure about the SEO friendlyness of this technique.

[RyanKent]

This comes down to technical details of site infrastructure. I strongly prefer the site's main navigation to be consistent throughout the site. If a user is at the inter-regional area and chooses a regional article the same navigation would be present. You could have a second sub-navigation bar which changes based on your location within a site. This is just my thinking and it is a bit challenging to envision your process without seeing it in action.

The short answer is you are free to duplicate your site and use canonical tags. In most cases I would view such duplication as a waste and the better approach would be finding a way to present a single page which provides the content. The duplicate page approach sounds like a bandaid for a poorly designed site.