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I have an insurance website. When I search something like "car insurance", my website appears twice.

  1. www.example.com
  2. www.example.com/car-insurance

From a SEO point of view, I imagine this dilutes the weight of the page? Should I set a "canonical" meta tag on one of the page pointing to the other one? We've been working real hard to get to the first Google result page and I don't want to screw all this good work.

Should I leave it alone? should I use a canonical link?

Stephen Ostermiller
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Yannick Richard
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    If you're ranking well don't mess with it – John Conde Jan 13 '16 at 20:54
  • this sounds safe but we're ranking 5th and 6th place, I tought maybe having a canonical link would give all the weights to the main site and mayby rank first or second? – Yannick Richard Jan 13 '16 at 20:56
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    That would be on the assumption that the other page is losing you weight... tempering with it could just end up with one page ranked rather than two, and not increase rankings. – Simon Hayter Jan 13 '16 at 20:58

1 Answers1

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It is not hurting rankings to show up twice in the search results. It just means that you have two or more pages that Google thinks are relevant for the search term.

Combining pages does not usually significantly increase the ranking power of the page. More pages with quality content on your site are much more likely to attract links which help your site rank better. Spend your time creating content rather than combining it.

I would suggest that showing up twice in the results is a good thing:

  • You get twice the real estate in the search results
  • Google likes your site enough that you can get two listings. Not all sites get that treatment. Many webmasters strive to get "sitelinks" which have several links in the results.
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Stephen Ostermiller
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  • this makes sense. I think we are obsessed with ranking #1 in google. I can't get to position #1 and I thought this might be an interesting idea. Thank you for the input – Yannick Richard Jan 13 '16 at 21:09
  • I still think about doing the change. From a CTR perspective, having 2 differents results will necessarely divide the CTR for each page. If only one page is showing, CTR will be higher thus ranking better no? – Yannick Richard Jan 14 '16 at 19:45
  • Google's CTR algorithms have to take that into account. Two results in the search results is quite common. Google is going to know how that effects CTR for that type of display. – Stephen Ostermiller Jan 14 '16 at 20:15