Canonical usage and duplicate content

[alsvik]

Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik

[AlanMosley]

Yes, thats the idea.

one other thing, i hope that urls on the site dont have capital letters like your examples, search engines are case sensitive and will see page and Page as 2 different pages

[alsvik]

Hi About the case sensitivity, it's just an error on my side in this thread. When i read on the "normal" rel=canonical usage, it seems to be ment for ie a product-page where one product is shown on two different pages , where the rel=canonical points to the first/most important page. So the usage I think of, is not covered in googles own explanation ...

[AlanMosley]

A canonical tag tells the search engine to give credit to another page, where you have duplicates you can say that this is the page i want to give credit for this content.

Prev and next tell goolge to give the credit for all the content on a series of pages to the one page, usually page one. You can use a canonical with a prev and next when you have other parrameters such as sortby=???, this would say that no matter how you sort this page, i want you to only see the canonical version, and that all the credit for all the canonical versions of these pages should be give to page one