I have a site where I provide solutions to problems/questions. In my CMS, the 'Question' and 'Solution' are two different content types. The solutions are embedded within the Question pages.
For example:
Question: What is foobar?
The length of the question can range from 4-5 words to 100+ words.
Solution: Foobar is Lorem Ipsum.
It will be one to multiple paragraphs answer. It has its own URL too.
I want only the question pages (example.com/question/what-is-foobar
) to be viewable to users.
Problem:
example.com/question/what-is-foobar
and
example.com/solution/foobar-is-lorem-ipsum
are being seen as duplicate content which is quite obvious.
Another problem is that the Solution's pages are appearing on search results which I don't want. I want only the question pages to appear on search results.
Now, to fix the issue, I have two alternatives. In my solution pages, I can either:
Use noindex.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
Use the canonical tag.
<link rel="canonical" href="example.com/question/what-is-foobar" >
Use 301 redirects but that does not look like a good option as I will have to keep adding redirects.
Which one is more suitable in this situation? I think canonical would be the better one. However, I am not sure because of the length of the questions. If the question itself has, say 80-100 words, does it make the two pages not suitable candidates for canonical URLs? In other words, is it okay to use canonical tags even when two pages are 80-90% similar?