Setting up cannonical when splitting a long page

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Perry Bernard: Not if it has different content.
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  Perry Bernard: Perhaps if you don`t want organic traffic to visit page 2 without first having read page 1... did you split it because of loading issues? If yes, you could have lazy-loaded the second part?
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  Vishal Gupta: 1. In some respects, yes. However, visiting page 1 is not really essential for a visitor to find context in the content.
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  Vishal Gupta: 2. Reducing page load time was not really the objective, the original page content seemed to be excessively long.
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  Vishal Gupta: The content of the two pages is different. The objective is to send the SEO signals of page 2 to page 1. I don`t know if this is possible.
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  Richard Hearne: If you split /content/ into /content/ and /content/page/2/, and then canonicalise /content/page/2/ to /content/, Google will likely end up indexing what you have on /content/ only, so you`ll rank for less content. In virtually all cases, that will result in less search visibility overall.
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  Vishal Gupta: Richard Hearne Ok, that makes sense.
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  Kuba Serafinowski: Richard I`d assume google would rather disregard that canonical as content doesn`t match.However, the 2nd page would probably rank worse because of weaker internal linking structure, not to mention a fresh URL.
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  Vishal Gupta: To clarify, Google is ignoring the canonical that points to page 1, on the paginated page. What is the best practice, to try and make page 1 the stronger page or to try and get page 1 and the paginated page 2, to both rank? I`m not sure if that`s clear.
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  Richard Hearne: The problem is that you cannot rely on that canonical being ignored. It`s up to Google. If you want it to be ignored I`d not canonicalise /content/page/2/ to /content/. Either self-canonicalise both pages, or create a new /all/ page and canonicalise /content/ and /content/page/2/ to /content/page/all/.
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  Vishal Gupta: Richard Hearne As I mentioned, Google is ignoring the canonical that points to page 1, on the paginated page and it appears that the content on the paginated page is being devalued, hence the problem. I read that canonicalising to an all/view all page is not a good practice. Therefore, would self-canonicalising each page be the best option?
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  Richard Hearne: Hard to say "best", but better than what you`re doing now IMO. That doesn`t mean changing will result in a better outcome. You need to take a holistic view to this. Does this content work better on 2 pages?
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  Ammon Johns: Canonicalization is ONLY for where multiple URLs have the same content and you want to tell the search engine which one you`d prefer people use. Anything else is misuse.What you are trying to do needs to be done via the navigation, where only page 1 is in your navigation menus, and the link to page 2 is only within page 1, and your site map. Page 2 will rank more poorly because of this, as it will have less link-juice overall, but that`s a natural consequence of what you are asking to do.
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  Vishal Gupta: Ammon Johns This is how I have set up the pages and what you have described is what I I have observed. Does this mean that the pages should not have been split up to be begin with? So, should both pages self-canonicalise?
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  Ammon Johns: Vishal Gupta that`s very hard to say when I genuinely struggle to understand quite what you are trying to accomplish, or why you think a visitor landing on a second page, which you said has different content (so will rank for completely different searches) and doesn`t need visitors to have read the first page to get value from it, should have to go via the first page, and not land directly on page 2 when it is the better page for their needs.Are you worried that page 1 will be too short? That it won`t match long-tail searches that use a couple of words from page 1 and some that you moved to page 2? Because both of those will happen anyway just by splitting the pages.(Although `too short` is a nonsense - the quality of content matters, and that it be big enough to provide all the quality information it needs to, but never, ever, a word count).I genuinely can`t picture what situation you are in. If page 2 has unique content, and slightly different content, why dissuade visitors from a positive experience of reading it unless they go through a maze first?
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  Vishal Gupta: Ammon Johns I haven`t done a good job of explaining the situation. Page 2 is a continuation of page 1, so the content is similar. We added content to the original page, i.e. page 1 and realised that we have enough content to create two, reasonably sized pages. So, some of the content that was on 1, is now on 2 along with some additional content, forming two pages that are not excessively long. We want both to rank, but only the content on page 1 seems to do so. I was wondering if the canonicals were the problem, as Google disregards the canonical pointing to 1 from 2. Also, if the canonicals are different, I would assume that the titles, descriptions and headings on both pages should also be.
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  Ammon Johns: Vishal Gupta remove the canonicals as step 1. Canonicalization is ONLY for duplicate content, such as if a site were on a host where you didn`t have access to redirects but it still had old links to the http version rather than the https version of the same page.At the top of page 2, make clear it is a continuation of the topic on page 1 and put a link to page 1. But don`t force them to use it. They know better than you whether they need to to answer the question in their mind.Put links to both page 1 and page 2 in the navigation of the site, but make clear that page 2 is part 2 or `continued` or whatever method you like.Then let Google sort it out.Page 1 will already have a small advantage in that any links the content ever got will be to that old original page URL, but page 2 is free to work its own mojo going forward.
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  Vishal Gupta: Ammon Johns The pages and navigation are already set up in the manner you have described. I imagine you mean both pages should canonicalise to their respective unique urls, as opposed to removing the canonicals (tags), as advised in step 1?
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  Ammon Johns: Vishal Gupta what`s your obsession with canonicals? How many links in your navigation point to the non-canonical URL? Canonicals only really matter to correct people using the wrong one enough that it is worth adding bytes of code to the page along with the microseconds of load time that adds, to fix it.Self canonicals are useful if you get a lot of links that add their own UTM parameters, such as you use custom parameters in AdWords ads for the pages, or you get a ton of links from FaceBook, but otherwise they really don`t do anything - unless you deal with very aggressive NegativeSEO attacks.
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  Vishal Gupta: All the advice has been of great value. Thanks to everyone for taking the trouble.