Can I redirect duplicate blogs to give credit to one?
-
I have two sites that have no duplicate content (yet). One ranks better than the other but has a crappy hyphenated domain name (Domain A), and the other one is the "brand site" with a better domain name (Domain B). I'm creating a blog with technical articles and corresponding videos. I want the videos to refer to the better domain name (Domain B) because I can't see referring people to a hyphenated domain (it would sound horrible). But, the hyphenated domain has a better chance of improving it's rankings (long story why). Can I duplicate the content and just use a canonical tag on Domain B to give the credit to Domain A? If I do that, is it done on each post? Or the blog's main page? What I think would happen is any links to Domain B would pass the juice to Domain A. Is that correct?
I know Canonical's are tricky and I don't want to screw this up, so I'd greatly appreciate some advice from the experienced people on here.
Thank you.
-
Thanks. You're right - I was making it to complicated so I just acquired an easier to remember domain that will 301 over to a single copy of the blog. I think putting a canonical on every post and hoping for the best would be, as you say, shooting myself in the foot.
Thanks for the help.
-
My gut reaction is that this is starting to sound too complicated, and you may be shooting yourself in the foot, but I don't understand the nature of the two sites, to be fair. I assume that they each have a unique role, since they currently have no duplicate content.
When it comes to canonical vs. 301-redirect, I think the core difference is what you want to have happen to users. A 301-redirect will take the user to the other site, whereas a canonical won't. If you essentially want to syndicate content to your own site, then a cross-domain canonical is a valid way to do that. This has to be done on the level of each individual post, though.
Google can ignore cross-domain canonical - it's just a hint, and definitely don't abuse it. For two sites, though, it should be reasonably effective. Again, the situation still sounds a little overly complex to me, and I can't say there's not a better solution, but I think the canonical is viable here.
-
Sorry - have to chime in here. Canonicals DO work cross-domain, and they often do pass link-juice, but it's somewhat at Google's discretion.
-
Thanks, and yes - I did over-complicate my explanation. There are a lot of articles out there about a cross-domain canonical, so I think it could be done, but maybe there's a simpler way to do this without duplicating content.
I want the authority to go to the hyphenated domain (it's higher ranked and I'm trying to push it a little further). So if MyDomainA/blog doesn't exist, but I add a 301 to send that to My-Domain-B/blog, what happens if there's a link to MyDomainA/blog? Would that still pass authority if the linked url (MyDomainA/blog) doesn't really exist?
Thanks again.
-
Hey PeachTree,
Sounds like you have a complicated situation there. However to answer your specific question, Canonical's only work for pages on the same domain, so it won't have any benefit.
You could 301 redirect pages from the hyphen domain to the equivalent page on the branded domain. This will pass the majority Authority of the hyphen domain to the brand site.
Hope that helps
Iain - Reload Media
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can I use duplicate content in different US cities without hurting SEO?
So, I have major concerns with this plan. My company has hundreds of facilities located all over the country. Each facility has it's own website. We have a third party company working to build a content strategy for us. What they came up with is to create a bank of content specific to each service line. If/when any facility offers that service, they then upload the content for that service line to that facility website. So in theory, you might have 10-12 websites all in different cities, with the same content for a service. They claim "Google is smart, it knows its content all from the same company, and because it's in different local markets, it will still rank." My contention is that duplicate content is duplicate content, and unless it is "localize" it, Google is going to prioritize one page of it and the rest will get very little exposure in the rankings no matter where you are. I could be wrong, but I want to be sure we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot with this strategy, because it is a major major undertaking and too important to go off in the wrong direction. SEO Experts, your help is genuinely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Redirecting an IP address
Just taken over a new client who recently moved from A.N. other platform to Shopify. I just found reference to their old website IP address and it appears to be not redirecting. Can I simply use something like Traffic Control (Shopify app) to redirect to the new domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Duplicate page content on numerical blog pages?
Hello everyone, I'm still relatively new at SEO and am still trying my best to learn. However, I have this persistent issue. My site is on WordPress and all of my blog pages e.g page one, page two etc are all coming up as duplicate content. Here are some URL examples of what I mean: http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/3/ http://3mil.co.uk/insights-web-design-blog/page/4/ Does anyone have any ideas? I have already no indexed categories and tags so it is not them. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3mil0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
SEO friendly blog.
i've read somewhere that if you list too many links/articles on one page, google doesn't crawl all of them. In fact, Google will only crawl up to 100 links/articles or so. Is that true? If so, how do I go about creating a page or blog that will be SEO friendly and capable of being completely crawled by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
Issue with duplicate content in blog
I have blog where all the pages r get indexed, with rich content in it. But In blogs tag and category url are also get indexed. i have just added my blog in seomoz pro, and i have checked my Crawl Diagnostics Summary in that its showing me that some of your blog content are same. For Example: www.abcdef.com/watches/cool-watches-of-2012/ these url is already get indexed, but i have asigned some tag and catgeory fo these url also which have also get indexed with the same content. so how shall i stop search engines to do not crawl these tag and categories pages. if i have more no - follow tags in my blog does it gives negative impact to search engines, any alternate way to tell search engines to stop crawling these category and tag pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sumit600 -
Penalized for duplication?
Hi there, In February 2012 one my web pages (.co.uk) dropped from page 1 to page 5 for the keyword 'Menopause' and was replaced with a .PDF Late January 2012 I launched a duplicate version of this webpage however targeting .ie due to difference currency and legalities, I had made sure in webmaster tools that both websites were both Geographically correct, I am also using hreflang tags on both webpages. One thing that is strange is if I copy the first few paragraphs of the webpage in question into Google.co.uk, it's the .ie webpage that appears. Any help would be appreciated in why this has happened. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Blogs with different focuses
Suppose I got a blog about cooking and another about computers. What's the best architecture for SEO ? mysite.com/cooking-blog mysite.com/computers-blog OR cooking-blog.mysite.com computers-blog.mysite.com ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcelocustodio0