Same content on other domain owned by de company. Canonical is not working
-
Hi!
I am analyzing a website right now. It's a school, let's name it NEWSCHOOL. This school is owned by other school, let's name it, BIGSCHOOL
NEWSCHOOL is specialized in tourism degrees, and the BIGSCHOOL is a bigger and older one with a lot of different degrees.
What happens is that NEWSCHOOL has a course, let's name it TOURISM DEGREE.
BIGSCHOOL has that course too, with the same content, trying to help to promote the content, because this school is older, well known and has a consolidated brand internationally.BIGSCHOOL, has placed a canonical tag, telling Google that content comes from NEWSCHOOL.
What is happening is that the result of newschool is beeing omited by google. The first result is the BIGSCHOOL content, and then a lot of training portals, where the degree content is too to increase its visibility.
So, I would like to know, how can we do to say google that the content that it should show is the one of NEWSCHOOL and not the one in BIGSCHOOL. It's pretty clear that Google knows that those portals are closed related, because it is omitting the NEWSCHOOL results.
I know that we can send a link from the content area from one portal to the other in the content we want. But... would it solve the problem... and y we have to repeat that for each degree, woudn't it be a little dangerous?
Would like to know your points of view!
Thanks!
-
Thanks Everett, I agree that the best would be creating diferent content, but It is a little difficult, cause it is the explanation of the contents and programming of one course.
Thank you for your answer, and I will recomend publishing the content first in NEWSCHOOL and sending to the index before sending that content to other pages or portals!
-
The cross-domain rel canonical tag is a "hint" to Google, not a "directive". They can and do ignore it when other signals overwhelmingly indicate that a different page is the canonical one.
My advice would be to write new content for NEWSCHOOL.
If you can't do that, consider all of the different signals that Google can use besides the rel canonical tag:
- Initial publish date of the content
- Initial indexation date
- External links pointing to the content
- Internal links pointing to the content
- Domain authority (including domain-wide links)
- Age of the domain
- How the two pages are linking to each other
Last but not least you could noindex the BIGSCHOOL version, but not the NEWSCHOOL version and leave your cross-domain rel canonical tag up.
Again, it would be best to have unique content on both sites.
-
On my sites, if I have rel=caononical on Page A, referring to Page B (on another domain) as the source of the content, I do have a followed link from Page A to Page B. That link is in a sentence that says that the content was originally published on Page B on the other domain. I do not know if this is the way that Google would have done this, but this is what I have done and I can say that the results have been excellent. Page B does very well in the SERPs. (Page A is on a much more powerful website.)
-
Hi!
So, your point is to wait for that to happen, isn't it? What do you think about sending a link from the BIGSCHOOL course page to the NEWSCHOOL course page? I mean, canonical + link
Thank you!
-
Thanks Rebecca! I would probably go that way!
-
Thanks Umar!
What do you mean with ...
"I reckon your "New School" is not offering lots of degree courses so yes you can get the link from "Big School's" content but make sure, you are linking in a proper and natural way"
I woudn't be natural... cause both have the same owner...
-
I suggest lots of patience here. One of the goals of the rel=canonical is to have the ranking value of the BigSchool page passed to the new domain. If you simply do rel=canonical that will happen. If you use noindex, nofollow, robots, meta robots or anything else then you will take, by total chance, whatever google decides to give you.
I would be willing to sit for months on this if you are going to rel=canonical route.
-
You could noindex, follow the BIGSCHOOL tourism degree page.
-
I agree with Umar that BIGSCHOOL's overall authority is probably getting in the way. Is there any way to get a dofollow link from their course page to yours to help reinforce the linkage? Funneling a little extra juice your way certainly wouldn't hurt and it makes sense contextually.
-
It can take google a really long time to honor some rel=canonical. I have used some and it has taken many months for all of them to be honored.
-
Hey,
It seems that Google is giving respect to "Big School" because of it's overall authority. If you like to continue this approach, you might need to work on the overall authority of "New School" to get things straight.
Frankly speaking, I wouldn't go with this strategy as there are lots of other ways to leverage your new site from the old one. For instance, you may place the attractive banners at the "Tourism" page that point to your new school and stuff like that.
I reckon your "New School" is not offering lots of degree courses so yes you can get the link from "Big School's" content but make sure, you are linking in a proper and natural way.
For more details about canonical tags FAQs, please refer to this brilliant resource from Dr.Pete,
https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsHope this helps!
Thanks,
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
Let's say a blog is publishing original content. Now let's say a second blog steals that original content via bot and publishes it as it's own. Now further assume the original blog doesn't notice this for several years. How much damage could this do to blog A for Google results? Any opinions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CYNOT0 -
Domain transfer
Hi Everyone! I work for a company that had a new website built through a digital agency and that website went live 2 months ago. I have only been with the company for 2 months and find myself under the gun, because they are not coming up in organic search results that they used to. The old domain was 301'ed to point to the new domain. There were also 1 to 1 redirects set up to transfer the old page authority to the new, equivalent pages. In everyone's experience, how long does it take for a domain to start populating for search terms that it used to? I know there are mixed reviews on 301 transfers and how much of the old domain authority is preserved when you take this route. What is your experience? Just looking for some answers. Thanks in advance! John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdvisGroup0 -
Will we be penalised for duplicate content on a sub-domain?
Hi there, I run a WordPress blog and I use [community platform] Discourse for commenting. When we publish a post to Wordpress, a duplicate of that post is pushed to a topic on Discourse, which is on a sub-domain. Eg: The original post and the duplicated post. Will we be penalised for duplicating our own content on a subdomain? If so, other than using an excerpt, what are our options? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ILOVETHEHAWK0 -
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
Merging Domains
Up until last week, we had separate domains for each of our 3 products. We've now merged two products to sit under one URL. The merge coincided with a CMS upgrade which effectively killed all of our old URLs save for the homepage. Is it best for me to 301 the old homepage to it's new place, as well as the rest of the old site's top pages to according pages on the new site? Or is there a better solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Copying contents from a blog site (External) to a company blogsite (internal)
Hi, I have a client that has several external blogs www.blogsite1.info www.blogsite2.info and he also has the www.companywebsite.com the main domain of course is the comapnywebsite.com. They are doing some thing wrong, because instead of generating contents inside the main domain, the create contents in the blogsites and send links to the blogsites to see those contents. So they are inviting their users to EXIT the website... So, I told him, If you want to generate contents, please keep a blog INSIDE your domain www.companywebsite.com/blog, but keep the other ones, cause they are generating links (they are .info domains, that is not good, but they are nice keyword match domains) Now, he told me he was thinking on copy and paste the contents from the external blogsites to the internal website. I warned him about generating duplicate content. But.... is it really a problem? They are not in the same domain... Could google give a penalty because of that to the main domain? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
What do I do about sites that copy my content?
I've noticed that there are a number of websites that are copying my content. They are putting the full article on their site, mentioning that it was reposted from my site, but contains no links to me. How should I approach this? What are my rights and should I ask them to remove it or add a link? Will the duplicate content affect me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0