Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content

[theLotter]

I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other.

The domains are geo specific, so for example.

www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz,

and

www.page.fr with content xxx

is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?

[MikeRoberts]

Assuming I fully understand your question, here's an example as an explanation: If Page A has 2,000 words and Page B has 500 but the bulk of Page B's content appears in Page A, then Page B is a subset of Page A's superset and should have a canonical tag pointing to Page A.

[Dr-Pete]

Is page.fr the same page as page.com, but in French?

[theLotter]

Yep, Mike's understanding is correct.

The two pages would be very similar, just one would be shorter.

page.fr is pretty much the same page as page.com, but in French and shorter

[Dr-Pete]

If Page.fr is in French, I'd use rel=alternate/hreflang and not the canonical tag. It should allow both versions to rank for the appropriate audience without causing issues with duplication:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

These aren't "true" duplicates and rel=canonical could disrupt the ranking ability of the French site.