: Right canonical pages for encylopedia-style site I have a website that contains a lot of short (150 word) descriptions of key concepts. The concepts are organised hierarchically so a description

@Heady270

All duplicate content on the web is not bad and there is no need for a zero tolerance policy. It is fine to repeat content on your site when it is in a context that is appropriate for users. Usually, Google will choose to index a page that contains unique content even it contains some duplicate content. If Google finds a page that has nothing but snippets that appear on other pages, then I may choose not to index that page at all. Having all content on your site appear on two or three other pages is not going to get your site penalized or cause Googlebot problems when crawling your site. At worst Google will just choose not to index some of your pages.

The canonical tag is most useful when there are a large number of possible variations in URL that all return the same content. Some examples are:


Each user gets a tracking parameter such as a session id like /index.html?ss=t3te9893t3e
There are paramters on the the url that control how items are sorted on the page like /products.html?sortby1=name&sortby2=price&sortby3=rating


In those cases, the content can be duplicated hundreds or thousands of times and the canonical tag keeps Googlebot focused on a single version of the page.

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@Kaufman445

A canonical is set per page and functions much like a redirect, whereas no redirection is taking place.

From your description I assume the following scenario:


Page 1 - Details about Spray-On-Cheese
Page 2 - Details about Goat Cheese
Page 3 - Details about Cow Cheese
Page 4 - Details about Goat Cheese Manufacturing
Page 5 - General Goat Cheese Info (exact duplicates of Page 2 and Page 4 on one page)


Google Webmaster Tools Help says this:


To gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results, and
to consolidate properties, such as link popularity, we recommend that
you pick a canonical (preferred) URL as the preferred version of the
page.


Basically this means, you need to decide on which page should gain from backlinks, etc. In your case, I'd canonical all non-overview-pages to the overview-page. In your case, that would be:


Page 2 -> Canonicals to Page 5
Page 4 -> Canonicals to Page 5
etc.

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@Ravi8258870

You're not explicit about this, but I'm assuming you're asking specifically about using the canonical link element (CLE).

If so it's worth noting that Google (for one) don't guarantee to honour it; they describe it as a "hint and not an absolute directive". Because the CLE is intended to deal with duplication (and near duplication) rather than solve architectural problems, I'd expect there to be a greater chance of it being ignored when used in the latter way.

In other words it doesn't sound like you're solving a duplication problem, but a site or information architecture problem. So I'm not sure that CLE is the right tool for the job nor a reliable one.

In my opinion, it'd be much better to structure your site in such a way as to design the problem out.

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