Rel canonical between mirrored domains
-
Hi all & happy new near!
I'm new to SEO and could do with a spot of advice:
I have a site that has several domains that mirror it (not good, I know...) So www.site.com, www.site.edu.sg, www.othersite.com all serve up the same content. I was planning to use rel="canonical" to avoid the duplication but I have a concern:
Currently several of these mirrors rank - one, the .com ranks #1 on local google search for some useful keywords. the .edu.sg also shows up as #9 for a dirrerent page. In some cases I have multiple mirrors showing up on a specific serp.
I would LIKE to rel canonical everything to the local edu.sg domain since this is most representative of the fact that the site is for a school in Singapore but...
-The .com is listed in DMOZ (this used to be important) and none of the volunteers there ever respoded to requests to update it to the .edu.sg
-The .com ranks higher than the com.sg page for non-local search so I am guessing google has some kind of algorithm to mark down obviosly local domains in other geographic locationsAny opinions on this? Should I rel canonical the .com to the .edu.sg or vice versa?
I appreciate any advice or opinion before I pull the trigger and end up shooting myself in the foot!
Best regards from Singapore!
-
Wow - that's a huge impact. It's hard for me to believe this one change would have such an impact, but hopefully these new numbers stick.
-
Hi Dr. Peter,
Just thought I would share the initial results of your suggestion because they appear to be so dramatic!
I put it a rel=alternate tag on every page indicating the .edu.sg version of the URL for "en-sg" and the com version of the url for "en".
From MozAnalytics: Before
Rank 1-3: 4 keywords
Rank 4-10: 21 keywords
Rank 11-20: 3 keywords
Rank 21-50: 2 keywords
Rank 51+: 216 keywordsFrom MozAnalytics: After
Rank 1-3: 50 keywords!!!
Rank 4-10: 19 keywords
Rank 11-20: 3 keywords
Rank 21-50: 13 keywords
Rank 51+: 167 keywordsThat's pretty crazy in under a week - Not sure if its 'real' since I never personally went to check rankings on these keywords, but wow! If the MozAnalytics information is correct I am blown away! Unfortunately its for a niche site in a tiny market so its not going to lead to fame and riches, but its still an amazing result!
Thanks so much for the great advice
Alex
-
Happy to help - hope it does the trick.
-
Fantastic response Dr. Peter! Thanks for taking the time to explain and to suggest the rel="alternate" tag which I have now implemented in a little experiment.
I very much enjoy your posts on the moz blog and thank you for all the indirect help they have given us in the past.
Best regards,
Alex
-
I'm not sure there's a one-sized-fits-all answer. If the .com is more geared to an audience outside of Singapore, and the .edu.sg site is more geared to the local audience you could set a region and/or language with rel="alternate" hreflang:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
This is a bit more subtle canonicalization signal that Google can use to sort out sites with language and/or regional copies (the regional aspect may be relevant even if both sites are in english).
The next question would be: where does your traffic come from? If you want to consolidate, but most of your traffic is coming from outside of Singapore, then I'd probably stick with the .com - it still has a "generic" status. The .edu.sg may rank more strongly in Singapore but fall off everywhere else.
I wouldn't worry much about the DMOZ link, especially if you have a solid link profile. DMOZ links have gotten buried over the years and typically don't carry nearly the value most people think. At some point, they could be a solid boost to a new site with a small link profile, but I think even those days are well behind us.
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 redirect old domain to new domain.
We just recently signed up to Moz with hopes of fixing our Moz Ranking. We have an old domain - http://at-net.net and a new domain - https://www.expertip.net We have set up 301 (Permanent) redirects from all pages on the old site to the new, but aren't getting the ranking or aren't getting recognized from external links to the old sites. I've read the moz article on 'Link Juice' and followed those practices, but it doesn't seem to help. Does anyone have advice on doing this? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | greg.lanier
Greg0 -
Purchasing a domain to redirect to a new domain (note same industry) - Black hat or White hat technique?
Hi Everyone, Ok so here is my question. I have a client who sells gourmet tea and gourmet spices. She has a culinary blog. There is a culinary blog that just posted that the website will be shut down in the near future. It has 100% white hat links. Would it be considered black hat to buy the domain and redirect it to my clients blog which is also a culinary blog? I would really like to ask Matt Cutts this question. Does anyone know how to send him questions? Thanks Carla
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Rel="canonical" of .html/ to .html
Hi, could you guys confirm me that the following scenario is completely senseless? I just got the instruction from an external consultant (with quiet good SEO knowledge) to use a rel="canonical" for the following urls. http://www.example.com/petra.html/
Technical SEO | | petrakraft
to
http://www.example.com/petra.html I mean a folder petra/ to petra is ok - but a trailing slash after .html ??? Apart from that I would rather choose a 301 - not a rel canonical. What is your position here?0 -
Beginner - needs to better understand rel=canonical. What is the best resource?
I'm pretty sure I have pages/posts that are competing on the same keyword and would like to fix it. What is the best beginners guide to understanding rel=canonical and how to use it to improve our SEO?
Technical SEO | | JonnyBird10 -
How to use rel canonical?
Hi, I am having some questions about this and I think you can help me on this. Here I have the example of my problem: pagination: Suppose that I have a new with 2 pages http://www.espectador.com/noticias/208907/fernando-pereira-encuesta-de-cifra-prendio-una-lucecita-amarilla-en-el-pit-cnt you can access the first page by different ways: www.espectador.com/1v4_contenido.php?m=&id=250419&ipag=1 http://www.espectador.com/1v4_contenido.php?m=&id=250419 http://www.espectador.com/noticias/250419/alvaro-vega-fa-creo-que-cosmo-fue-usada-por-bqb-para-evitar-una-subasta-a-la-baja-y-asi-quedar-con-las-manos-libres Same meta descr, same body with different URLs. Can I use rel canonical in the file 1v4_contenido.php that point to the friendly url? <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.espectador.com/noticias/250419/alvaro-vega-fa-creo-que-cosmo-fue-usada-por-bqb-para-evitar-una-subasta-a-la-baja-y-asi-quedar-con-las-manos-libres](view-source:http://www.espectador.com/noticias/250419/alvaro-vega-fa-quotcreo-que-cosmo-fue-usada-por-bqb-para-evitar-una-subasta-a-la-bajaquot-y-asi-quotquedar-con-las-manos-libresquot)"/> do I have a loop here? The rel canonical can goes in the page 1? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Why is there duplicates of my domain
When viewing crawl diagnostics in SEOmoz I can see both "www.website.com" and a truncated version "website.com" is this normal and why is it showing (I do not have duplicates of my site on the server)? E.g.: http://www.klinehimalaya.com/
Technical SEO | | gorillakid
http://klinehimalaya.com/0 -
301 from old domain to new domain
Hi, I need to create a 301 redirect for all internal pages located on organic7thheaven.com to the homepage of our new site at http://www.7thheavennaturals.com/ Currently internal pages of the old site such as the following are returning a page not found www.organic7thheaven.com/products/deepcleansing/miraclemud.asp Can anyone help me in setting up a .htaccess file for this problem please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MJMarketing0 -
Old Domain - What to do?
A client recently bought an older domain that is keyword-rich to an aspect of his company. The main website has both e-commerce and call-to-action elements. Our team is split on whether or not to create a micro-site on that domain focused on that aspect of the work that he does or to simply redirect the old domain to his main website. I have not had the opportunity to look at the link profile of the recently acquired domain nor do I have any idea of how many times it's changed hands (which would seem to now be a possible indicator of doorway pages). If any clarification would help, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer.
Technical SEO | | MountainMedia0