Hey all,

 

I have been reading quite alot in regards to the canonical tag but am still a bit unsure if its right for what im trying to do.

 

Basically I am currently making a website for bathroom fitting in london http://www.guildbathrooms.com

 

All the keywords are aimed towards phrases such as bathroom fitters london, bathrooms london etc...

 

What I have done to broaden my chance of finding potential customers is make seperate pages for different london boroughs such as http://www.guildbathrooms.com/bathroom-fitters-greenwich.php

which are the same as the original london page but have just change all "london" keywords to greenwich (or whatever area im targeting) and then give each page a canonical tag pointing back to the original bathroom fitters london page.

 

What im struggling with is:

 

Will each of the pages with the tag be indexed in regards to its own keywords and show for relevant results and just redirect to where im pointing the link to or will it simply be ignored and viewed as being the same as the original page its pointing to and assumed its exactly the same.

 

What im basically trying to find out is if it will give me a greater chance of being found based on the fact its now covering multiple locations instead of 1 or am i telling google ignore it because its similar?

 

Sorry to give such a vague question but any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for reading

 

Best regards

 

David

 

 

 

I don't have first hand experience with canonical tags, but it is my understand they should only be used when the content is (almost) indentical, not when the content is deliberately (almost) identical for SEO locality juice.

 

With canonical you are saying preference this other page of near identical content over myself, trying to exclude duplicates from indexing as much as possible.

 

What you want to appear as and should focus on, is making each pages content unique and relevant to the locality as possible.

Canonicalization can be a challenging concept to understand (and hard to pronounce: "ca-non-ick-cull-eye-zay-shun"),
but it's essential to creating an optimized website. The fundamental
problems that canonicalization can fix stem from multiple uses for a
single piece of writing–a paragraph or, more often, an entire page of
content–that appears in multiple locations on one website or on multiple
websites. For search engines, this presents a conundrum: Which version
of this content should they show to searchers

Hi David,

 

Um, better rethink your plan here mate as your current url structure for Croydon etc is not a good plan. The content is far too similar - come to think of it is this just a 1 page site for seo use? Smells a bit fishy digging the navigation - all empty apart from a link to other spam sites in other regions with the same design like http://www.bathroomssidcup.co.uk/.

 

Forget canonical mate, it can't save this sort of mess.

 

Moving forward I suggest making a coverage page with a map and series of locations covered. Then improve the overall content to increase the overall keyword strength across the site. There's nothing currently on the site that is strong enough to stand out. Also instead of making more sites just work with one.

 

Edit: Forgot to say canonical is used to help search engines understand that if yoursite.com/cheese/ is the canonical (true) path. If then they find a reference as yoursite.com/ChEEsE/ the canonical says it's the same as yoursite.com/cheese/ and you would like this canonical path to be indexed / used. This helps to prevent duplicate pages however it's only a suggestion, not an order.