Training events - optimisation and avoiding cannibalisation

[RG_SEO]

This is quite a broad question I’m afraid – any help would be appreciated.

I’m trying to find the best way of optimising our new training pages. These events are aimed at teaching our customers how to use our software to do different tasks. Inevitably, the themes and naming of these training workshops overlap with some of our products. A close example would be, to make up a product, ‘Keyword Ranker’ and ‘Keyword Ranker Training’.

Someone has raised the concern that the training pages might start outranking the pages for our main tool, particularly as the training will be heavily promoted via social media. Also, the on-page content talks about similar topics. They’ve suggested that we use rel=canonical tags pointing from the each training page to the related product page to prevent this from happening.

I myself don’t think this is a good idea as this is not what the rel=canonical tags are designed for. I think that they might prevent the events pages ranking for any query at all, which is not what we want. Also, I believe that the training pages and the products are different enough that Google will work out which to rank for relevant queries. Has anyone else had an experience of doing this? Are there any approaches that people would recommend? Or is this something that we shouldn’t be worried about?

A few other thoughts that I’ve had:

• Using schema.org event markup to emphasise what the events pages are about.

• Making sure to remove old events once they have expired. I thought it best to let these 404 as I’ve read that 301s to a category page than cause Google to penalise content.

• Putting internal links from the product pages to the relevant training workshop pages.

• Using the meta unavailable tag on events pages, so that when the event has happened then it will be removed from Google’s index.

[Linda-Vassily]

A couple of thoughts--yes, that is not what rel=canonical is for. It is meant for identical or nearly identical pages. If you wanted that effect you could noindex the training pages, but you say you don't want that, so both of those choices are out.

If you have multiple training pages that go to one product, you will presumably have links on those multiple training pages back to that one product page, and that will be a sign to Google that the product page is important.

Also, if the product page stays up and the training pages are up for a short while and then go away, those short-term training pages are unlikely to overtake the product page that remains up and is able to attract links and other positive signals.

[RG_SEO]

Thanks for your thoughts Linda - much appreciated