Canonicals with differing content
- by Jimbo Jonny
Interesting conundrum here with canonicals. Lets say I have a site with a "verified" system where other websites can become so and so "verified". Their url to send people to to confirm verification is something like "blah.com/verify/company1" and "blah.com/verify/company2". But logically "blah.com/verify" itself is not verifying anyone in particular, so it redirects to the signup form to get verified, at "blah.com/verify/register"
As far as the actual companies registered, I figure it doesn't make sense to index every individual url with only the tiny difference of which company name it's saying yay or nay to being verified, so canonicals could come in handy on those pages to condense the indexing. Yet making "blah.com/verify" the canonical "hub" doesn't work well because it's a signup form, not a verification page, so technically has quite different content from the various verification pages themselves. But at the same time it's a bit unfair to choose 1 company to point all the canonical benefits too to use that as the "hub", yet a bit wasteful to have google index every individual verification page and spread out all that linkjuice.
Basically, I'm just looking for advice, what's best for this from a search engine standpoint?
