Silly question about noindex and canonical

[LeahHutcheon]

Hi,

This is probably going to sound a bit stupid, but I nevertheless want to check.

We have a site that's going to have identical pages (really not my choice) for a sales reason. The two examples would be example.com/profile-name and example.com/location/profile-name

Users using the onsite navigation will always end up in the latter example naturally as they have to select a location before viewing content (plus having the location in the url is nice as there are multiple profiles across different locations that have the same name). However, it's easier to sell our services when we can offer just example.com/profile-name to users for their own marketing reasons.

I'd like to make the example.com/profile-name noindex follow, and have just the example.com/location/profile-name indexed, but not sure if it would be better to implement canonical tags instead? Can anyone see any potential pitfalls of using either method or does it not really make a difference (which is what I suspect, but I'd rather look stupid than get this wrong)?

Thanks!

[mayanksaxena]

Hi Philip,

I did a lot of research on a similar issue a few months back. I am certain that Google recommends canonical tag to resolve the issue of duplicate content. That should be the way to go about it.

It's easy to implement and works just perfect.

Hope it helps. !!!

[SEOAndy]

There are two solutions, one which is canoncialisation pointing to the correct location, the other (which i prefer for this kind of thing) is to implement 301 redirects from the shorter url.

I think that is ideal because you are saying it's easier to tell people to go to that location, thats fine and great, but we want search to hit the real page - so therefore the second / landing page doesn't need to exist ... just redirect it and avoid confusion.

hope that makes sense

[Modi]

Dont make them noindex, rather use canonical tag.

Using noindex - will make the page out of search engines index.But using canonical - It not only gives a strong indication to search Engines that the canonical page is the best page and rest are duplicates, But, it also passes on existing page Authority from duplicate pages to the canonical page

Trust it help !!

[Spletnafuzija]

Definitely use canonical. I use it on all my pages for the same problem.

As Gagan said: Using noindex - will make the page out of search engines index...

Hope i helped.

[LeahHutcheon]

Thanks for the input guys! Will implement a canonical then.

[LeahHutcheon]

Unfortunately we can't redirect from the shorter to the longer as those we are selling the profile spaces to want to be able to see example.com/profile-name on the browser