How to handle this duplicate content

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How to handle this duplicate content

meelosh

1:32 pm on Dec 7, 2015 (gmt 0)

I have a landing page that is example.com/animals/ and on this page we have full content for example of...monkey, horse, lion and snake. The same exact content for each of these topics is also found on its own individual page.... e.g example.com/animals/monkey has the monkey verbiage and example.com/animals/horse has the horse verbiage and so on. The animal specific page like horse only has the content for horse but this is also found on the "animal" page amongst the content of all the other animals. My concern is that this could be seen as duplicate content and if so can i safely use the rel canonical on the individual animal pages to point back to example.com/animals/
hope i am making sense here and appreciate any help
thanks

fathom

5:34 pm on Dec 7, 2015 (gmt 0)

Your explanation generally suggest you won't have any canonical problems.

The BAD point about canonicals (duplicate content) since pages predominantly have the same content each gets an equal share of the available PageRank meaning neither (none) will rank as well as only having a single page with the addition of a little more original content.

You generally don't have this condition, but to completely avoid canonical issues as suggested by this Matt Cutts interview [stonetemple.com...]

... your animal page is substantially adding more details, facts, observations, original content and merely aggregating likened content together. Although I would only snippet the original content from the monkey, horse, lion, snake pages just enough to get a sense or gist of what is beyond the link, and not copy verbatim word-for-word the complete pages.

fathom

5:40 pm on Dec 7, 2015 (gmt 0)

A rebuttal to my own post... If all the monkey, horse, lion, snake pages have is a paragraph of content, that makes for "THIN CONTENT" so it would be best to delete those pages (or at least prevent them from being indexed).

meelosh

6:29 am on Dec 8, 2015 (gmt 0)

Appreciate the input Fathom.... I think the best will be to noindex these smaller, "thinner" pages. thanks for the help