Is it a good idea to use the rel canonical tag to refer to the original source?
-
Sometimes we place our blog post also on a external site. In this case this post is duplicated. Via the post we link to the original source but is it also possible to use the rel canonical tag on the external site?
For example:
- The original blogpost is published on http://www.original.com/post
- The same blogpost is published on http:///www.duplicate.com/post.
In this case is it wise to put a rel canonical on http://www.duplicate.com/post like this:
?
What do you think?
Thanks for help!
Robert
-
Thank you, I'll read the article.
-
Thank you!
-
Yes it is perfectly legitimate. You check this blogpost for verification -
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
-
If it really is word for word, then putting a canonical in place is a wise move. It should be remembered that the canonical is only an instruction for Google, not a directive, and so it isn't 100% Panda Proof (although I would say it's pretty high)
I'm not completely sure why you would want to copy the content completely to another site, as you won't be able to rank that webpage with the duplicate content. If it's providing users with useful information and you don't have the time/resource to rewrite it, then that would make sense to me.
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
-
Should summary pages have the rel canonical set to the full article?
My site has tons of summary pages, Whether for a PDF download, a landing page or for an article. There is a summary page, that explains the asset and contains a link to the actual asset. My question is that if the summary page is just summary of an article with a "click here to read full article" button, Should I set the rel canonical on the summary page to go to the full article? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Autoboof0 -
Canonical redirects
Hello, I have a quick question: I use wordpress for my website. I have a plugin for translating the website in other languages. Thus, I have 2 versions of urls, one with /en, one without (original languale). This has been seen as duplicate content. I have been advised that the best to do is to use canonical redirect. Should I use it on the general header.php (the only header I can find in the CMS), or should I redirect each page singularly? I believe the second is the best way, but I can't find headers and txt documents for each page in my FTP. As well I have seen this post, in which is explained that canonical redirects can be done directly in the general header.php http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2009/02/avoid-duplicate-content-use-canonical-url-in-wordpress-fix-plugin/ Is it true? You have any suggestion?
Technical SEO | | socialengaged
Thanks! 🙂 Eugenio0 -
Using Rel Nofollow on Duplicate Pages
Hi there, I have a rather large site that has duplicate content on many pages due to how it's being spidered by google. I was hoping I could set the internal link to this page as "nofollow." My question is that I have hundreds of other sites with backlinks to these duplicate content pages.. will this affect me negatively if I tell google not to index the duplicated pages?
Technical SEO | | trialminecraftserverfinder0 -
The Mysterious Case of Pagination, Canonical Tags
Hey guys, My head explodes when I think of this problem. So I will leave it to you guys to find a solution... My root domain (xxx.com) runs on WordPress platform. I use Yoast SEO plugin. The next page of root domain -- page/2/ -- has been canonicalized to the same page -- page/2/ points to page/2/ for example. The page/2/ and remaining pages also have this rel tags: I have also added "noindex,follow" to page/2/ and further -- Yoast does this automatically. Note: Yoast plugin also adds canonical to page/2/...page/3/ automatically. Same is the case with category pages and tag pages. Oh, and the author pages too -- they all have self-canonicalization, rel prev & rel next tags, and have been "noindex, followed." Problem: Am I doing this the way it should be done? I asked a Google Webmaster employee on rel next and prev tags, and this is what she said: "We do not recommend noindexing later pages, nor rel="canonical"izing everything to the first page." (My bad, last year I was canonicalizing pages to first page). One of the popular blog, a competitor, uses none of these tags. Yet they rank higher. Others following this format have been hit with every kind of Google algorithm I could think of. I want to leave it to Google to decide what's better, but then again, Yoast SEO plugin rules my blog -- okay, let's say I am a bad coder. Any help, suggestions, and thoughts are highly appreciated. 🙂 Update 1: Paginated pages -- including category pages and tag pages -- have unique snippets; no full-length posts. Thought I'd make that clear.
Technical SEO | | sidstar0 -
Notice - canonical tag
I've got several errors pointing to canonical tag, but do not know how to solve.Any help? Rel Canonical Found 6 days ago <dl> <dt>Tag value</dt> <dd>http://www.yougraph.com/</dd> <dt>Description</dt> <dd>Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical.</dd> </dl> <a class="more expanded">Minimize</a>
Technical SEO | | nlopes1 -
Using a canonical tag to eliminate ID variables?
My research on seomoz has resulted in conflicting ideas regarding the canonical tag. One article says avoid it, the other says embrace it. We have fixed a majority of our architecture problems using redirects for duplicate content, however, when we send out newsletters we still have these pesky tracking ids. I figured out how to remove them from analytics, but am unsure of how this affects our SEO. An example of one of our links is: https://www.quicklearn.com/transcript/?utm_source=news101011&utm_medium=e&utm_campaign=newclass&nlid=news101011&UID=2287 The original url being www.quicklearn.com/transcript/ the custom (non-Google) variables being nlid and uid. Is this a problem? Do I need rel cononical tags on each and every page?
Technical SEO | | QuickLearnTraining0 -
Thumbnail-based navigation like YouTube Sidebar - they don't use ALT tag
Notice on the YouTube sidebar, each video has a thumbnail and a title. But, for the ALT tag, YouTube simply uses the word "thumbnail". In the past, i was using a keyword phrase for my thumbnail ALT tag. I thought I was being clever. But is this superflous? We note that the A tag on the YouTube items, encompasses the SPAN that is the video + title. Does Google associate the text of the title as valid "anchor text" despite the existance of other info in that span --- e.g. like View Count and the User Name of the video creator? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | anthony-3054420