: Canonical content and search result excerpts When you are building a site which has a search result page, (similar to https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/unanswered for example) which has excerpts

@Samaraweera270

I would like the search page to never show up in search results based on the content excerpts, but I would still like search engines to use the page to discover articles in my site.


After reading your other comments, the answer seems pretty simple. You can just tell search engines to crawl your pages but not to index them by adding a meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">


Don't just de-tune your pages and hope SE's won't index those pages. You can fully control this yourself.

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@Jamie184

Originally, aggregate pages were designed to be landing pages that would perform well in search engines. It was a way of attracting users to your site. Today, while this still can work, it is less of a factor. Some people de-tune these pages so that they do not outperform the original content. This makes sense if the aggregate page is for humans instead of machines. However, if you think that this page should perform well in search then the page would have to be tuned carefully. eBay does this to perfection.

You do not have to do anything "canonical" for this. You just have to decide if you want the page to perform well in search or not. From there, it is about tuning your pages.

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