Complex Canonical Tag Question

[realmaverick]

This is an already complex question, trying to talk about it in terms of widgets, makes it even more complex!

I run a customisation website that has widgets.

We have widgets for most brands and models on the market.

Here is an example of the setup/problem:

The main widgets gallery, holds all of the widgets for all of the brands. While browsing the main widgets gallery, if you click for example a "Black Widget", you'll be taken to the main download page for that item. If it's a Brand-X Model-Y widget for example, the pages title will be "Black Brand-X Widget".

However, if you're browsing a specific Brand + Model gallery, and you click on the same item "Black Widget", you'll be taken to a download page, with the title Brand Model Black Widget. But it's actually the exact same download page, as the Black Brand Widget page.

To further add complication, there are around 5 other models, that use the exact same widgets. For example the Brand-A Model-B. The Brand-A Model-B widgets gallery, holds the exact same "Black Widget", clicking this, takes you to the same page, but with the title "Black Brand-A Model-B Widget".

In the database, Brands and Models are grouped via operating system. Brand-A Model-B and Brand-A Model-C have have the same operating system and therefore their galleries show the same widgets. Some of the operating systems have 20+ models, meaning lots of duplicate content, and considering we have hundreds of thousands of widges, that's a crap load of duplicate content.

From a usability perspective, this is perfect. As it saves confusion, once the user has selected their model, the download pages make it obvious, that the widget in question is made specifically for their model.

However, from a duplicate content perspective, it's far from ideal.

My thought, is that all of the brand + model download pages, should have a canonical tag, to the main brand download page.

My concern, is that it may then effect the brand + model galleries ranks. If the Brand-A Model-B Widgets page, links to pages that have the canonical tag, will this effect the ranks of the Brand-A Model-B page?

Hopefully you've been able to follow my explanation of the setup and can offer some advice.

Thanks a lot.

[enigma1]

For the duplicates problem you should keep a single version of the product download page. I suspect you have different links effectively linking to the same page. Something like
example.com/?products_id=5
example.com/?brand_id=2&products_id=5
example.com/?category_id=4&products_id=5
etc.

What I would do is to use a unique version of the link so the page content is consistent because the link is the same from all listing pages when the spiders access it.

Now for visitors usability I would use a cookie or js and track the path they follow to the download page and display the appropriate different content, title etc, I want to, based on it. This way spiders won't find any duplicates and the user sees the relevant content you want him to see.

Canonical tags aren't the ideal solution and maybe ignored by some spiders or treated differently in the future. They do not imply that different page content will be indexed. And if the spiders use the canonical version, the other content variations will not show in the SE index. So if you use the canonical tag as it stands now, Google will use that one version of the page.

[g1smd]

I much prefer a situation where the final product page has ONE URL that does not include "how" you got there. This page doesn't then link back to one category. No. Instead it links back to all related categories in a separate nav box.

The product appears at

example.com/p34272-this-acme-red-widget

and is listed in and links back to categories

example.com/c34-red-widgets

and

example.com/c2-sale-items

and

example.com/c76-acme-widgets

.

Category information does not appear in the URL for the product.

[realmaverick]

Considering these URLs are already in existence though, even if I didn't add the canonical tag, I'd obviously have to 301 them.

I do want Google to use the 1 version of the page. As atm, I am pretty sure the other versions, are causing ranking issues for the main page. And as there are so many of them, likely for the entire website.

Good idea regarding the cookie.

g1smd, so on the download page, this would link back to the various model pages that it's compatible with?

At present we do list the compatible models, but they aren't hyperlinked, as I was concerned about the number of links on the page.

How would you suggest, doing away with the extra pages I have now? 301?

[realmaverick]

I've took the plunge and made is so we only have 1 download page for each item and 301 redirected the other urls to the main download page.

I am also going to list the categories, that the item belongs to, on the page.

Thanks for those who offered advice.