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Yes, I think the best way to move for me, in the long term, will be to add unique contents to each page, but in the short term the Canonical tag could help to consolidate similar page.

I have an additional question though about using canonicals for this kind of music pieces:

If I have 3 versions of a piece named "Wedding Collection" like this:

1. Wedding Collection for violin and piano

2. Wedding Collection for cello and piano

3. Wedding Collection for guitar

And I consolidate all three pages with a canonical pointing to a main "Wedding Collection" page that lists those 3 different versions, what happens if someone search for "wedding collection for violin and piano"? Will I be able to rank for those specific keywords? And if so, what page will show-up in the index? Here is how the use of the canonical can become confusing to me... thanks for any further help!

Hello here.

I own a music publishing company:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/

And we have several similar items which only difference is the instrument they have been written for.

For example, look at the two item pages below:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Canon2Vl.html

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Canon2Vla.html

They are the exact same piece of music, but written in a different way to target 2 different instrumental combinations. If it wasn't for the user reviews that can make those two similar pages different, Google could see that as duplicate content. Am I correct? And if so, how do you suggest to tackle such a possible problem? Via canonical tags? How?

To have a better idea of the magnitude of the problem, have a look at these search results on our site which give you product variations of basically the same piece of music, the only difference is in the targeted instruments:

www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Canon+in+D

www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Meditation

www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Flight

And, similarly, we have collections of pieces targeting different instruments:

www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Wedding+Collection

www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Christmas+Collection

www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Halloween+Collection

Any thoughts and suggestions to tackle this potential page duplication issue are very welcome!

Thank you to anyone in advance.

Ok, thank you, now I get the point... then here is my next question: is there a way to tell SEOmoz bot to ignore duplicate page with a defined canonical tag? If not, the SEOmoz duplicate page report is useless for me. I am not interested to know about duplicate page for which I have already defined a canonical tag for.

Thanks!

I am sorry, but I don't understand your point. If two pages are similar, we can use the canonical tag to "consolidate" them and avoid duplicate issues. Am I right? Or what are canonical tags for?

Hello here,

today SEOmoz bot found and marked as "duplicate content" the following pages on my website:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=mp3

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html?tab=pdf

And I am wondering why considering the fact I am using on both those pages a canonical tag pointing to the main product page below:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/PatrickCollectionFlPf.html

Shouldn't SEOmoz bot follow the canonical directive and not report those two pages as duplicate?

Thank you for any insights I am probably missing here!

Yes, I will look into doing that on GWT.

Was a nice and useful chat indeed! Thank you again.

Yes, actually I could get rid of the lpg parameter (it wasn't really needed!), so now the tag definitions are (for the 3rd page of the Guitar index):

<LINK rel="<a class="attribute-value">next</a>" href="[http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=4](view-source:http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=4)"> <LINK rel="<a class="attribute-value">prev</a>" href="[http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2](view-source:http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2)"> <LINK rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=3](view-source:http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=3)">

Now, the only doubt I still have is to add or not add the noindex tag to the page when it is requested to be displayed in a different way (such as the "table view" or a different item display order). In my opinion, if I stick with the canonical tag I don't need a noindex directive. What do you think?

Mememax, after thinking I have some doubts though about what you have suggested.

Why I want to put a noindex tag to the page displaying the list in "table view" if I already have a canonical tag pointing to the "regular view" page? Wouldn't the canonical tag be enough for the purpose of telling that the "real" canonical page is the "regular view" version? I am asking this because if I want to apply a noindex tag to that kind of different view, I may want to do the same to the list displayed with a different order, and for any other different way of displaying the list, etc... hence just using the canonical tag would be appropriate, pointing always to the "regular list" view, no matter what kind of "filtering" or "different view' option is selected. What do you think?

In other words, I don't think I need to include a noindex tag for any different kind of view the user requests as long as I provide a canonical tag pointing to the regular view list.

Am I correct?

Yes, thank you Mememax, I agree with you 100%. That makes perfect sense and I will work on that tomorrow morning. I am eager to know Dr. Peter thoughts and confirmation.

On my side, I think I got it cleared-up now. Thank you very much again!

Thank you ! That makes sense now.

Please, have a look at the page below, I have modified the canonical tag as suggested:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=3&lpg=40

Is that correct?

Thank you again very much.

Thank you Peter, I guess you meant to have the "canonical" tag as last tag in your example above, and also the previous rel=next and rel=prev definitions should be inverted:

Am I correct? That makes sense. If so, I will update my site to reflect this.

Thank you for the link!

Thank you for your post, and I think you have just opened a doubt I had, and that's exactly what also concerned me.

Have a look at this typical category page of ours:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html

For that category pagination, I have implemented the rel=prev/next as suggested by Google, but being afraid to be penalized for duplicate content, I also put a canonical tag pointing at the first page of that index. Should I have put the canonical tag pointing to the page series itself?

Something like:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2

for the second page instead of the general:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html

as I am currently doing?

Thanks!

Great, you are very welcome! Please, keep me posted with your recovery progress.

All the best,

Thank you very much, that makes perfect sense. In my case, I am talking exactly about paginated content, and that's probably why all pages are in the index despite they are canonicalized to point to the main page. So, I guess that even if you have thousands of paginated pages indexed (mine is a pretty big e-commerce website), that's not going to be an issue. Am I right?

Yes, I think that may be definitively a possibile cause for your lower rankings.  Can't you rewrite those links in a  way to make them visible?

Yes, I think any kind of hidden contents may be damaging. Have you noticed traffic drop right after that change? Was that the only difference applied to the site?

Hello here,

here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag:

1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index?

2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index?

Thank you in advance for any insights!

Fabrizio

Never mind, I have just found your site... thank you again!

Thank you very much Marie for your time and explanation, I appreciated it. Do you offer SEO consultation? Please, let me know.

Thank you again!