Reinforcing Rel Canonical? (Fixing Duplicate Content)
-
Hi Mozzers,
We're having trouble with duplicate content between two sites, so we're looking to add some oomph to the rel canonical link elements we put on one of our sites pointing towards the other to help speed up the process and give Google a bigger hint.
Would adding a hyperlink on the "copying" website pointing towards the "original" website speed this process up?
Would we get in trouble if added about 80,000 links (1 on each product page) with a link to the matching product on the other site? For example, we could use text like "Buy XY product on Other Brand Name and receive 10% off!"
-
Have you seen a corresponding drop-off in the ListFinder pages over that time. If the canonical is kicking in, you should see some of those pages fall out as more ConsumerBase pages kick in.
Is there a reason your canonical'ing from the more indexed site to the less indexed one. It could be a mixed signal if Google things that ListFinder is a more powerful or authoritative site. Cross-domain can get tricky fast.
Unfortunately, beyond NOINDEX'ing, it's about your best option, and certainly one of your safest. It's really hard to predict what the combo of cross-domain canonical plus link would do. From a dupe content standpoint, it's risk free. From the standpoint of creating 80K links from one of your sites to another of your sites, it's a little risky (don't want to look like a link network). Since you're only talking two sites, though, it's probably not a huge issue, especially with the canonical already in place.
Google interprets cross-domain canonical heavily, so it can be a little hard to predict and control. Interestingly, the ConsumerBase site has higher Domain Authority, but the page you provided has lower Page Authority than its "sister" page. Might be a result of your internal linking structure giving more power to the ListFinder pages.
-
Great post Peter.
Here are some links of a product that is on both sites. Hopefully this will help you provide some more insight.
http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/shutterbugsphotography-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html
http://www.listfinder.com/mailing-lists/shutterbugsphotography-enthusiasts-mailing-list.htmlThe ListFinder pages are currently mostly indexed (70k out of 80k) which makes me think they are different enough from one another to not warrant a penalty.
The ConsumerBase pages started indexing well when we added the rel canonical code to LF (went from about 2k pages to 30k in early December, but since 1/2/2013 we have seen a dropoff in indexed pages down to about 5k.
Thanks!
-
With products, it's a bit hard to say. Cross-domain canonical could work, but Google can be a bit finicky about it. Are you seeing the pages on both sides in the Google index, or just one or the other? Sorry, it's a bit hard to diagnose without seeing a sample URL.
If this were more traditional syndicated content, you could set a cross-domain canonical and link the copy back to the source. That would provide an additional signal of which site should get credit. With your case, though, I haven't seen a good example of that - I don't think it would be harmful, though (to add the link, that is).
If you're talking about 80K links, then you've got 80K+ near-duplicate product pages. Unfortunately, it could go beyond just having one or the other version get filtered out. This could trigger a Panda or Panda-like penalty against the site in general. The cross-domain canonical should help prevent this, whereas the links probably won't. I do think it's smart to be proactive, though.
Worst case, you could META NOINDEX the product pages on one site - they'd still be available to users, but wouldn't rank. I think the cross-domain canonical is probably preferable here, but if you ran into trouble, META NOINDEX would be the more severe approach (and could help solve that trouble).
-
Yes, sir - that would be correct.
www.consumerbase.com and www.listfinder.com.
The sites are not 100% identical, just the content on the product pages.
-
are these two sites on the same root domain? it seems like most of the feedback you're getting are from people who are assuming they are however, it sounds to me like there are two separate domains
-
Zora,
Google accepts cross domain canonical as long as the pages have more similar content.
It is not necessary to add hyperlink pointing to canonical page. If your sites are crawler friendly, canonical hints will change search results very quickly.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
Ensure that Google doesn't find any issue with your Sitemaps. If you add products frequently, submit the updated Sitemap following the same schedule.
All the best.
-
I am sorry i am not understanding why you need a rel = in this matter if the sites are two different sites?
What is your end goal ?
-
We chose rel canonical because we still want users to be able to visit and navigate through site 2.
They are both e-commerce sites with similar products, not exactly identical sites.
-
Zora. Totally understand, but my input and what Majority of people do is redirect the traffic.
A server side htaccess 301 Redirect is your BEST choice here.
Why dont you want o use a 301 and prefer a Rel, curious on what your take is on this.
and Thanks for the rel update info i didnt know
-
Thanks for the info Hampig, I'll definitely take a look.
Rel Canonical actually works cross domain now, Google updated it from when it originally came out.
-
Zora hope you are doing well.
I came across this video about a few weeks ago. I think this is suppose to be found under Webmaster tools although i have not used it, i think it might be the best solution to get googles attention to portions of the pages and what they are suppose to be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrEJds3QeTw
Ok but i am confused a bit. You have two different domains ?
or two version of the same domain?
Because from the sound of it you have two different domains and using rel = con wont work and you would have to do a 301 redirect. Even for my sites when i change the pages around i use 301 redirect for the same existing site.
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
-
How to fix duplicate URLs from Embedded Twitter Feed
We have an embedded twitter feed on our blog and we're seeing that every time we create a new post, a twitter url is created, thus resulting in duplicate content. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | annie.graupner
Blog post URL: http://domain.com/blog-title
Duplicate URL automatically created: http://domain.com/blog-title/www.twitter.com/handlename What is the best way to fix this?0 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?
Good morning, Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk. Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS. Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly? Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500). Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
Duplicate content across internation urls
We have a large site with 1,000+ pages of content to launch in the UK. Much of this content is already being used on a .nz url which is going to stay. Do you see this as an issue or do you thin Google will take localised factoring into consideration. We could add a link from the NZ pages to the UK. We cant noindex the pages as this is not an option. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1 -
Cross-Domain Canonical and duplicate content
Hi Mozfans! I'm working on seo for one of my new clients and it's a job site (i call the site: Site A).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
The thing is that the client has about 3 sites with the same Jobs on it. I'm pointing a duplicate content problem, only the thing is the jobs on the other sites must stay there. So the client doesn't want to remove them. There is a other (non ranking) reason why. Can i solve the duplicate content problem with a cross-domain canonical?
The client wants to rank well with the site i'm working on (Site A). Thanks! Rand did a whiteboard friday about Cross-Domain Canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1