I work with a lot of large ecommerce websites that have hundreds or thousands of very thin content pages (with little text or product information on them). And 90% or more of those pages get little to zero visits to them. These will waste your Google crawl budget, meaning that Google will periodically crawl through all of these useless pages rather than focusing on recrawling your important pages for changes or updates, or rather than crawling to discover new pages.
Should I add an SEO canonical to all thin-content pages?
These clients often wonder whether they should invest a lot of time and money into making those hundreds or thousands of thin-content pages more robust, with useful text content on them. Or whether they should add a canonical tag onto those pages. A canonical tag is a short piece of computer code that tells Google and other search engines: Please do not put this page into your search index results, but instead index another specified page that we do want indexed instead of this page.
Trimming down your website’s thin content pages also is a sign of a higher quality website to search engines. Search engines like Google need to spend less of their bot machine’s crawling energy and time on well streamlined websites and so this kind of technical housekeeping work can be rewarded with improved rankings overall sitewide.
But generally, no, you should do some important analysis before adding SEO canonical tags to all of your thin content pages right off the bat. There’s no quick short answer. Good SEO takes critical thinking. Read on. below. But first, another common question…
Common SEO canonical follow-up questions
Then I often hear, Should I canonicalize to the category page, like to:
website.com/brand/category
Or, should I canonicalize to the best related product in this category like:
website.com/product/brand/category/related-product-with-more-traffic
For most good e-commerce websites, the category pages and subcategory pages drive most of the visitors to the website from Google organic searches. Then a decent share of traffic should come to product pages from “long-tail” search terms (longer, search queries that are often more product-specific).
Every site needs to be managed differently, but here is a common path to doing this analysis:
Category pages
Find out which popular keywords your website already ranks for in Google on pages 2 or 3. Then make sure that your site has good category and subcategory pages that will align with those terms, with the keywords in the page title, with helpful UNIQUE text on them, nice clear images with image alt attributes in them, and so on.
Product pages
Then for your hundreds or thousands of thin-content product pages: No, don’t kill yourself optimizing them all manually one by one. Instead I’d suggest the following. Conduct detailed keyword research to determine which popular (high search-volume) search terms should line up well with which product pages. Then optimize those important pages manually. Then carry on with that for medium-popular and modestly popular search terms that line up with product pages, and gradually work through optimizing those manually as well.
Make sure to write unique text that helps the readers on those pages. Do not just dump in the stock generic text you got from the manufacturer. Figure out the keywords your website can realistically rank for – don’t shoot for the moon. And add those terms into the text a few times. You may end up doing this process on like 10 to 50 pages initially. And maybe well over a hundred for larger sites.
So then let’s say you optimize 50 product pages like that. Then, do you just sell the other hundreds or thousands of product pages down the river by adding SEO canonical tags to them? I personally would not canonicalize those. At least not without some more analysis. I’d highly recommend doing this instead:
Dynamically optimize those pages using a plug-in, or by doing an Excel export of page data and import after doing mass edits. This all depends on what platform you are on and what plugins it allows, and what kinds of exports and imports it allows. But try to mass optimize those page titles, their product names in the H1 headers, and their meta descriptions.
Then I would add in a stock paragraph of three or four sentences to each of these hundreds of pages containing the same block of stock text content… but I would auto-replace each product name and also the primary keyword in that stock text at least twice.
When you have done all of this, put those up live on the site and let it run for 3 to 6 months. Then go back into analytics and analyze to see which of those products now are getting some decent traffic and which ones don’t. You will surely have earned a bunch of new Google traffic through this method. And then you can go through and make some cuts on which pages to add SEO canonical tags to, or add no-index tags to. If you don’t want them indexed at all in Google, then no-index tags would be a way to go. Use SEO canonical tags when you want to tell Google and other search engines that this page is a duplicate page with another page that represents the same searcher intent.
Which Product Pages Should I Add an SEO Canonical Tag To?
Where to draw the line when canonicalizing a product page is like this: If you have a very similar product that a searcher would see as a close match, and that other page can earn useful traffic, I’d go there. If you don’t have a closely similar product page, then go up to the subcategory page. The next step is to move up to the category page. And if there is no relevant category, show a custom 404 page to the users, and make sure that it also returns a 404 status code to crawlers. Contrary to common behavior, you almost never should canonicalize to your website’s homepage – Google does not recommend that practice because users don’t like to land on a website homepage when searching for a specific product.