Should I use canonical tags?

I have a webstore where I offer three similar products that vary slightly in feature set and they share the same target keywords (ie Honda Civic Coilovers). On each product page, we also show and link the other two items as options with a quick blurb of how they are different.

With that said, should I use canonical tags on two of the three pages if I'm looking to increase my ranking for that targeted keyword, so that the three pages aren't competing with each other?

Thoughts?

 

Cody, you might get a variety of opinions answering this question. I have a similar, though not identical, situation on my nonprofit religious website. I have perhaps 10 or so articles on various aspects of the central theme of "divine healing." Rather than canonicalizing all of them to the main article on that topic, I have chosen to self-canonicalize each article to itself, rather than to the main healing page. I prefer to have all those articles indexed (they are) and sending searchers directly to the specific nuances of the main theme that each page uniquely offers.

That said, I do suspect that your 3 product pages are more closely similar than mine are. I hope others can chime in here and offer you wisdom. What I've said above for more loosely-connected topics on the same overall theme works for me.

 

Let me paint a scenario here:

You have two pages ranking for the same keyword. You have a first page result, and a third page result. You decide to delete the page that is ranking on the first page. Your third page result doesn't move to the first page. You now only have a third page result.

This is why it drives me nuts when clients delete pages, ha.

 

You have three different pages on your website for the same targeted keywords and content is almost the same for all three pages. There is no need to add a canonical tag as these pages are within the website. But the major issue is here Keyword Cannibalization (the same keywords on different pages). And, you need to work on each and every pages separately to rank the same keywords for these three pages and that is not a good practice at all.
I want to suggest you keep the main page and add the other two pages in the same pages by using the H2 tag to separate them or use the pagination concept.

Hope you get my point.

 

I believe having two pages devoted to a similar topic is quite natural unless they are identical. I would not use 'canonical' for such - Google will decide which is more relevant and put it on the top.

 

But the question is three pages targeting the same keywords so why not use only one page to target similar keywords instead of using multiple pages for the same keywords.

 

I can imagine a situation where you may want to target variations of keywords or phrases like

1. Tours in Turkey
2. Tour operator in Turkey
3. Tour company in Turkey

As the competition may be high, you may decide to promote three pages instead of one. Again, if the Title tag and H1 tags are the same, there is no point having three pages.

 

Yes, why not. Canonical tags can be very helpful to achieve your rankings for your targeted keywords for your desired page.

 

How canonical tags are helpful for achieving the ranking for the targeted keywords?

 

By using canonical tags will tell google that you want a particular page of your website to rank for certain keywords.