canonical links or alternative content

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  • SEO
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Consider an application in the form of a complex professional directory where a client has a profile page that may fall under multiple categories. For example, an attorney or doctor that practices under multiple specialty categories, (i.e. an attorney that handles divorce, personal injury and criminal law).

Links to this profile page may occur from several different categorized lists that each contain important search keywords in the URL. For example,

/Attorneys/San Diego Criminal Attorneys/John Doe
/Attorneys/San Diego Personal Injury Attorneys/John Doe
/Attorneys/San Diego Divorce Attorneys/John Doe

I have at least two choices here. I can canonicalize the profile page link with something like:

/Attorneys/San Diego Attorney/John Doe

But by telling search bots that this is the primary page, am I not losing important keyword ranking in the URL? In other words, will the index bots still rank the keywords from the other sources?

Alternatively, I could create separate profile pages for each category. The downside to this is that internal page rank pointing to these profile pages would be spread across several individual profile pages instead of building rank for a single page.

The other question would be, how much additional content would need to be added to each profile page for Google to consider it non-duplicate? For example, if I change the page title, descriptions, and add additional text to the profile page that includes the category keywords would this be sufficient to avoid the duplicate content issue if the rest of the profile information on the page remains the same?

I am NOT an SEO specialist. Our goal has always been to create good content and let the bots do their thing. This practice has treated me well (as content is in fact King). However, as the site has grown to over a million indexed pages, I an endeavoring to adhere to best practice wherever feasible. Part of this process is restructuring dynamic urls to include silo path type urls in front of the dynamic parameter strings for better clarity and indexability. We were already using canonicals to try and minimize any duplicate content issues with the dynamic script driven urls, but during this process, I want to revisit all this.

Thanks in advance for any input. It is appreciated.
#alternative #canonical #content #duplicate content #links
  • Profile picture of the author onsett
    Originally Posted by Steviebone View Post


    I have at least two choices here. I can canonicalize the profile page link with something like:

    /Attorneys/San Diego Attorney/John Doe

    But by telling search bots that this is the primary page, am I not losing important keyword ranking in the URL? In other words, will the index bots still rank the keywords from the other sources?
    That is correct. A canonical tag on this page -- /Attorneys/San Diego Criminal Attorneys/John Doe -- does not help the primary page (/Attorneys/San Diego Attorney/John Doe) rank for the keyword "San Diego Criminal Attorney".

    However, if you have backlinks pointing to '/Attorneys/San Diego Criminal Attorneys/John Doe' that have San Diego criminal attorney or similar 'criminal attorney' anchor text, and then you add a canonical tag pointing to the primary page, it would help the primary page rank for 'San Diego Criminal Attorney'.

    There would be no benefit to creating new URLs then canonicalizing them to the primary page. To rank the profile pages for all 3 keywords, a better approach would be to focus on building & acquiring high quality links (internal and external) with your target anchors. If you go with the one profile page approach, build the profile pages with lots of content that targets all 3 keywords under different header tags.

    Depending on the size of your site, you could try a more complex URL structure. A site with great SEO is emedtv.com. Notice how one treatment -- ginkgo -- appears in different categories of the site (Senior Health and Alzheimer's):

    senior-health.emedtv.com/ginkgo/ginkgo.html
    alzheimers.emedtv.com/ginkgo-biloba/ginkgo-biloba.html

    Originally Posted by Steviebone View Post

    The other question would be, how much additional content would need to be added to each profile page for Google to consider it non-duplicate? For example, if I change the page title, descriptions, and add additional text to the profile page that includes the category keywords would this be sufficient to avoid the duplicate content issue if the rest of the profile information on the page remains the same?
    There is no hard set rule here. But as a rule of thumb, I try to make the body content less than 10% duplicate. This means that, at the very least, you should rewrite the profile pages to make the content appear unique to Google.
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