Using canonical for duplicate contents outside of my domain
-
I have 2 domains for the same company, example.com and example.sg
Sometimes we have to post the same content or event on both websites so to protect my website from duplicate content plenty i use canonical tag to point to either .com or .sg depend on the page.
Any idea if this is the right decision
Thanks
-
Unfortunately, that's a lot more tricky. If you're trying to rank both the .com and .sg version for, let's say, US residents, and those sites have duplicate content, then you do run the risk of Google filtering one of them out. If you use canonical tags or something like that, then one site will be taken out of contention for ranking - in that case, you won't rank for both sites on the same term. The only way to have your cake and eat it too is to make the sites as unique as possible.
Even then, you're potentially going to duplicate effort and cannibalize your own rankings, so it's a risky proposition. In some cases, it may be better to try to promote your social profiles and other pages outside of your site that have some authority. It doesn't have to be your own site ranking, just a site that's generally positive or neutral.
-
Thanks Peter you answer has enrich the discussion
I think your suggestion is the proper way for different local domains versions of the same company or blog
My case is little different that actually lately i am trying to rank both of them in the seek of reputation management
It wasn't intended to be like that on the beginning but now we are trying to take advantage of our other local domain like .sg , .ch and .ae
-
Do you want the .sg site to only rank regionally in Singapore? You could use rel=alternate hreflang to designate the language/region for the two sites, and help Google more accurately know when to display which sites. This also acts as a soft canonicalization signal and tells Google that the pages are known duplicates:
-
Here's an article about rel=canonical where Dr. Pete answers some rel=canonical questions. With regards to rel=canonical passing PageRank he says:
"This is very difficult to measure, but if you use rel=canonical appropriately, and if Google honors it, then it appears to act similarly to a 301-redirect. We suspect it passes authority/PageRank for links to the non-canonical URL, with some small amount of loss (similar to a 301)."
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
At the end of the following Matt Cutts video (2:10), he says that there isn't a lot of difference between the page rank passing via rel=canonical and page rank passing a 301 redirect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA
When it comes to the content of the page, yes, the two versions of the page should be pretty close to identical. I've seen Google refer to it as "highly similar". Here's what Google says:
"A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version. One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines."
See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
So, if your pages are too dissimilar then Google may ignore the rel-canonical "suggestion" and the "wrong page" or both pages may appear in Google's index.
-
i think this is useful resource that answer a lot of questions around canonical
-
Thanks Doug for your useful response
Just i need to clarify your sentence
"Be aware that the value of any inbound links to that article will be allocated to the canonical version. "
Do you mean canonical link is passing the page rank similar to 301 Redirect?
What if the 2 pages wasnt 100% identical ?
-
Check this Video Out : http://moz.com/blog/handling-duplicate-content-across-large-numbers-of-urls
-
Yes, this sounds absolutely correct.
You can check it's working by doing a search for some unique content in your article or using the query with the article's title:
site:{domain} "title"
If everything is working correctly you should only see the canonical version of the article in Google's index. (you can also use the inurl: to check too.
Be aware that the value of any inbound links to that article will be allocated to the canonical version. (This doesn't apply to social follows/likes though.) So think carefully about the audience for the article before deciding which version is canonical.
It may not apply in your case, but it can be a good idea to think about your readers too. By adding a link in the article to the other site, you can help to cross-promote them. You may find tat if some of your visitors find your cross posted article relevant and useful to them they may be more interested in other article on the source 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
-
Duplicate content. Wordpress and Website
Hi All, Will Google punish me for having duplicate blog posts on my website's blog and wordpress? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Mike.NW0 -
Duplicate Content Problems
Hi I am new to the seomoz community I have been browsing for a while now. I put my new website into the seomoz dashboard and out of 250 crawls I have 120 errors! So the main problem is duplicate content. We are a website that finds free content sources for popular songs/artists. While seo is not our main focus for driving traffic I wanted to spend a little time to make sure our site is up to standards. With that said you can see when two songs by an artist are loaded. http://viromusic.com/song/125642 & http://viromusic.com/song/5433265 seomoz is saying that it is duplicate content even though they are two completely different songs. I am not exactly sure what to do about this situation. We will be adding more content to our site such as a blog, artist biographies and commenting maybe this will help? Although if someone was playing multiple bob marley songs the biography that is loaded will also be the same for both songs. Also when a playlist is loaded http://viromusic.com/playlist/sldvjg on the larger playlists im getting an error for to many links on the page. (some of the playlists have over 100 songs) any suggestions? Thanks in advance and any tips or suggestions for my new site would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mikecrib10 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
How to use internal tracking without causing duplicate content issues
Hi, We've been testing internal tracking for 4 weeks on a couple of pages using the basic string ?internalcampaign=X, but hese pages have started appearing in the search results. We don't currently have the facility to add canonical tags to correct this. Does anyone have any other solutions to this problem other than deleting the internal tracking or adding filters on the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NSJ780 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles
A few weeks ago my error count went up for Duplicate Page Content and Titles. 4 errors in all. A week later the errors were gone... But now they are back. I made changes to the Webconfig over a month ago but nothing since. SEOmoz is telling me the duplicate content is this http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/ and http://www.antiquebanknotes.com Thanks for any advise! This is the relevant web.config. <rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.antiquebanknotes.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
Technical SEO | | Banknotes
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" www.antiquebanknotes.com="" {r:1"="">http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/{R:1}" />
</action></match></rule>
<rule name="Default Page" enabled="true" stopprocessing="true"><match url="^default.aspx$"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll"><add input="{REQUEST_METHOD}" pattern="GET"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="/"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>0 -
Duplicate Content For Trailing Slashes?
I have several website in campaigns and I consistently get flagged for duplicate content and duplicate page titles from the domain and the domain/ versions of the sites even though they are properly redirected. How can I fix this?
Technical SEO | | RyanKelly0