Specific Canonical Questions

So i'm new to canonical tags, I've not needed to use them before (301's + rewriting seemed to always work best for most things)but a company i've just started working with has some duplicate content issues - they have four pages with identical content apart from the title which only has one word distinguishing them (i've replaced the words with a, b, c)-

• A technical information
• B technical information
• C technical information
• Technical information

My thinking is (beyond asking them to write original content for each product's technical information) to use a canonical tag to denote 'Technical Information' as the original page for ranking. It feels like a fairly minor issue as they are technically separate pages, but i'd rather one original page rank for this content and not confuse Google. Is this a good thing to do?

Also, if I have a News (or similarly blog) section with multiple pages, should I put a canonical tag from page 2, 3, 4 etc to the first News page to denote this as the main page for all news related results? Rather than searchers being returned Blog page 7 or whatever, they always see 'Blog'?

If i'm fundamentally misunderstanding canonical tags i'd love to learn.

Cheers in advance

blackhatldn said:

My thinking is (beyond asking them to write original content for each product's technical information) to use a canonical tag to denote 'Technical Information' as the original page for ranking. It feels like a fairly minor issue as they are technically separate pages, but i'd rather one original page rank for this content and not confuse Google. Is this a good thing to do?

Click to expand...

Yeah that's the common use of the canonical tag. The non-canonical duplicates will get deindexed and their link equity (if any) will be credited to the canonical page.

blackhatldn said:

Also, if I have a News (or similarly blog) section with multiple pages, should I put a canonical tag from page 2, 3, 4 etc to the first News page to denote this as the main page for all news related results? Rather than searchers being returned Blog page 7 or whatever, they always see 'Blog'?

Click to expand...

The general recommendation is using the canonical tag in paginated results only if you have a view all page to point them to. The view all page should gather in a single page all the news that are paginated. That's not possible in many cases where the paginated results are too many to load them in a single page so the other option is using the rel="prev" / rel="next". With this method G will understand every page as a part of a paginated serie and will (theoretically) distribute the link equity between them all. I once got some good results by doing this on a huge site where very old products were being buried in the deeps of the pagination.