Glossary Page - best practice

[brian-madden]

Hi guys,

We have a glossary on our website. All terms are accessible via a 'view all' URL, however we also have each letter on their own URL, e.g /a. Currently the rel=canonical tag for all the individual letter pages points to the view all URL. I'm just wondering whether that is best practice or not, as currently not all the individual letter pages are being indexed.

Thanks

[becole]

Brian, yes, this is the best practice. The canonical tag is essentially telling the search engines that the letter page is a duplicate of what's on the other page. So, they should give the credit to the other page.

Technically speaking, those letter pages are crawled by the search engines, but since they canonical tag is there the page is not indexed.

Again, this is the best practice if you're going to have the content appear in more than one location. Ideally, I would probably split it up into separate pages (a page for each term) if you can write enough content for each term to have it's own page. But, given the scenario you're outlining, this is most likely the best practice for your site. I'm asuming that the letter pages are clickable in your site's navigation and that users can click on them easily.