canonical seo question

[woosa]

Hi All,
There is a example.com site which has summary of products listed on home page and product details is on another page. Complication is that details pages are not much different from each other, example., only product name and model is different and remaining content are same.
-Since google consider details pages as duplicate, I marked it as canonical and point to summary page.
-Is canonical is right candidate for such case

[aakk9999]

If I understood correctly:
- summary of products are listed on home page
- there are number of product details pages
- these product details pages are pretty much the same apart from product name and model

I am not sure from your post how much one product detail page differs from the summary of products on the home page and the solution will depend on this:

1) If every product detail has the same info (bar name/model) as summary on home page, I would just noindex product details pages.

2) If home page with products is different to product details pages, and as you say, product details pages amongst themselves are pretty much the same, then you can pick ONE product details page and either:

- put rel=canonical on all other product details pages to point to the one you picked

- OR noindex all other product details pages apart from the one you picked

[woosa]

yes, your understanding is correct.
There are around 500 product pages are threre. summary page listed with product name/photo only, details pages has more content but 80% of contents are same across pages.
Option 2 is pretty good idea.
I already tried with noindex that unfortunately disappeared Adsense.
Do you think noindex triggered Adsense to stopped deliver, is canonical better option?
is there any other solution.
thanks

[aakk9999]

I am not the Adsense expert, you may want to post a separate thread in Adsense forum for a better insight. But if using canonical on pages still shows your ads, then you could use canonical on all other product details URLs pointing to the product detail URL you have shown as representative one.

[mcskoufis]

Woosa because you have 500 product pages I would try to alter the on page text programmatically as a start, then seriously consider investing in writting unique copy.

After all each of those 500 product pages can rank for a separate set of keywords and dramatically increase your sales and traffic from search engines.

If this is not possible then I would second aakk9999 great advice...

[Planet13]

I think I must be wearing the dunce cap today or something, but I gotta ask a question or two:

1) Is it possible to make ordering from the summary page for the products. If there is so little variation in the content, maybe a long summary page that allows ordering would be better.

2) Do I understand that you have adsense on your product pages? Are you trying to sell products or are you try to sell advertising space?

[bumpski]

I already tried with noindex that unfortunately disappeared Adsense.
Do you think noindex triggered Adsense to stopped deliver, is canonical better option?
is there any other solution.

Pages with Adsense ads must be indexed.

[phranque]

Pages with Adsense ads must be indexed.

pages with adsense must allow crawling by User-agent: Mediapartners-Google but i don't see why those pages must be indexed.

[bumpski]

All I can say is historically if an Adsense page was not indexed, at best the ads displayed were less targeted, falling back to Adsense's default site wide topic assumptions. In some cases no ads at all were shown. Basically if you wanted well targeted ads (in the past) the page also had to be indexed by Google.

I have not tested this recently but it was true in the past.

Anyone test this recently?