If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
-
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please?
What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website.
Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
-
Thanks for your thoughts on this, Dirk.
I really appreciate them.
E
-
Thanks for answering my question Dirk! I found the deeper follow up conversation interesting as well.
-
Hi Egol,
Interesting question, but difficult to answer. Could be a topic to ask on one of the Webmaster hangouts.
It all depends on how Google handles canonicals internally.
One possibility would be that Google considers the page from A that is syndicated on B not really as a page from B but a page from A. In that case, the links from that page would count as an internal link (A->A rather than as an external link B->A).
Another possibility would be that Google considers the fact that B is republishing the content from A as a kind of endorsement for A (in a non SEO world a site would only republish content from another site if the quality was really good). In that case, the links on the syndicated page would have value.
In both cases I would personally keep the links on the page. If you added them, it implies you think these links have some value for the visitor so taking them off wouldn't make much sense (unless your main goal was to add these links in order to optimise your internal link structure)
If you want to be on the safe side - if the links go to "commercial" pages, you could make them nofollow, if it's to other editorial content if would keep them as follow. I wouldn't omit the links - even when "nofollow" they could still generate traffic for your site.
Didn't found any "hard evidence" to support this, but we seem to have come in the stage where Google scared us so much about "bad links" that we start to question all type of incoming links.
Sometimes you just have to trust your gut feeling - if the link looks "normal" in the context (and adds some value for the visitor) I would stick to a follow link.Dirk
-
Thank you, Dirk.
Here is a question, one step deeper.
Let's say that I have an article on Site A that I want to republish on Site B with the rel=canonical on Site B pointing to Site A. The article on Site A has internal links to other pages on Site A. What should I do with those links when the article is republished on Site B.
1) Omit them
2) Nofollow them
3) Republish them allowing the links to be followed
I think that #3 is a bad idea. I believe that those links could be considered spammy.
I like #2 best because the links will send traffic to additional relevant content.
I think that #1 is the safest.
Do you have any opinion on these options?
Thank you.
-
No - it won't be seen as manipulative, in fact it is the recommended way to syndicate content. Check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066:
"Addressing syndicated content. If you syndicate your content for publication on other domains, you want to consolidate page ranking to your preferred URL.
To address these issues, we recommend you define a canonical URL for content (or equivalent content) available through multiple URLs"
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
-
Redirect closed shop to main shop, or keep the domain and content alive and use it for link building?
Hello, We used to have two shops selling our products, a small shop with a small selection of only our best quality products (domain smallshop.com), and a big shop with everything (bigshop.com). It used to make sense (without going into full detail), but it's not relevant anymore, and so we decided to stop maintaining the small shop, because it was time consuming and not worth it. There is some really good links pointing to smallshop.com, and the content is original (the product descriptions are different between both shops). So far, we just switch the "add to cart" button on the small shop into a link to the same product on the big shop, and did links from the small shop to the big shop also on categories pages. So the question is: in your opinion, is it better to do that, keep the small shop and content alive and build links to our big shop, or do 301 redirections and shut down completely the small shop ? Thanks for your opinion!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0 -
Can I use two sitemaps?
I have a Magento website. I am going to add a Wordpress blog under /blog. If I setup each with its own webmaster tools to submit a sitemap does it hurt anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Realtor site with external links in navigation
I have a client with a realtor site that uses IDX for the listings feed. We have several external links going over to the IDX site for various live custom searches (ie: luxury listings, waterfront listings, etc...). We are getting a Moz spam ranking of 2/7 for both "Large Number of External Links" and "External Links in Navigation". Chances are, these are related. My question is this: (1) Being the score is only 2/7, should I bother with fixing this? (2) If I add a rel="nofollow" to all the site-wide links (in header, footer & menu) will this help? I couldn't find anything definitive in the Q&A search. Looking forward to any insights!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcallander1 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Geographic site clones and duplicate content penalties
We sell wedding garters, niche I know! We have a site (weddinggarterco.com) that ranks very well in the UK and sell a lot to the USA despite it's rudimentary currency functions (Shopify makes US customers checkout in £gbp; not helpful to conversions). To improve this I built a clone (theweddinggarterco.com) and have faked a kind of location selector top right. Needless to say a lot of content on this site is VERY similar to the UK version. My questions are... 1. Is this likely to stop me ranking the USA site? 2. Is this likely to harm my UK rankings? Any thoughts very welcome! Thanks. Mat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Content Aggregation Site: How much content per aggregated piece is too much?
Let's say I set up a section of my website that aggregated content from major news outlets and bloggers around a certain topic. For each piece of aggregated content, is there a bad, fair, and good range of word count that should be stipulated? I'm asking this because I've been mulling it over—both SEO (duplicate content) issues and copyright issues—to determine what is considered best practice. Any ideas about what is considered best practice in this situation? Also, are there any other issues to consider that I didn't mention?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Should I remove all rel=nofollow links?
I have a 60 page site that had some nofollow links sprinkled throughout, 50% of which are probably on its mailto: email links. Should I remove all nofollows all in one go, or just the mailto links first, and later the others? Or has anyone had any negative effects in 2012 from this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0