Canonicals affected traffic?
-
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are white label classified platform providers and recently we marked canonicals on all the partner sites pointing to our home site as authority because we thought that Search Engines might penalize us for duplicate content as the classified ads are similar on all site, only theme and layout is different but now we are witnessing a huge decrease in our partner`s classifed section organic traffic. Can you please advise that is it because of canonicals , if yes than what should we do? like should we take canonicals off and if we take it off than how can we handle it legally.
-
Dear Bary,
First i want to appreciate for the articles that you had send me. They were really helpful. Now in my case the constraint is that we can not change the content and because of this we have 2 issue.
1. We dont want that any of our partner gets cannibalized by the other partner. Actually after we have pointed canonicals the traffic of one of our partner has increased significantly and others has decreased in the same manner like atleast 5 times.
2. If we dont point canonicals than according to this article http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling- legitimate-cross-domain.html what is the LEGITIMATE way of handling it.
Regards
-
we take this step to not to get penalized
-
You don't really get 'penalized' for duplicate content.
If somebody is searching for content that is identical on 2+ different sites, then it may simply be that only one will be included in the SERPs, however you should not receive a penalty for having the same content.
If possible you should have some sort of differentiation between the sites though.
-
Almost definitely canonicals here. You might want to read this for when Dr. Pete did it for his own site - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization and now that Google take into account cross domain canonicals - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday - you're effectively saying that all those other sites ARE your site.
Only option is to take them off and (I assume by legal you simply mean best practise SEO) you don't actually have to do anything. If your site or another site ranks that's up to Google's algorithms. If you're not going to differentiate the content then there's not much else you can do.
-
Were you previously being penalized on these sites? For instance, did you have a good rank for your selected keywords then randomly drop off the first three SERPs? Or are you just trying to take steps to not be penalized?
-
we are white label classified platform http://ads.naitazi.com/ which is the parent company and we provide this portal to couple of other sites as well so that they can generate more visits and user engagement. examples are http://ads.koolmuzone.com/ or http://ads.shopaholic.pk/ . So now you can see that content and layout is same only color theme n header, footer is different. So pointed canonicals on all the Partner Sites to our site to avoid duplicate content penalization and to stay in white hat SEO. Please advise what should we do now?
-
Dear Kyle,
we are white label classified platform www.naitazi.com which is the parent company and we provide this portal to couple of other sites as well so that they can generate more visits and user engagement. examples are ads.koolmuzone.com or ads.shopaholic.com . So now you can see that content and layout is same only color theme n header, footer is different. So pointed canonicals on all the Partner Sites to our site to avoid duplicate content penalization and to stay in white hat SEO. Please advise what should we do now?
-
The drop in organic traffic for your partner's sites is directly related to the canonical links. Before i can give advice on how to solve the problem i first need to know, what is the reason for the duplicate content?
-
If canonical is the problem, Google could have seen what you describe as a way to try to funnel all the rank.
Much more info is needed such as...
How duplicate is the content, remember it must be very similar or exact. cross domain canonical is allowed (and actually boosted traffic in my case, but my content is EXACT duplicates and needed due to technical operations issues)
Have you made any other recent changes to your site structure or marketing tactics?
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
-
Our organic homepage traffic just recently spiked from about a typical under 20 per weekend to about 820 -- what could be causing this?
Website: http://www.myinjuryattorney.com Our homepage typically receives under 20 organic visitors per weekend, but I just checked traffic this morning, and it was at a whopping 821 for just Saturday and Sunday. It's already at 212 this morning. I'm heavily assuming this is fake traffic as there were about 818 drop offs after visiting the homepage, an 84.41% bounce rate, and an average session duration of 5 seconds. Our typical metrics -- last weekend for example, were: 13 visitors to the homepage, 38% bounce, and an average session duration of 1 minute 26 seconds. Does anyone know who or what could be causing this? Could it be a competitor using negative SEO of some sort? Thank you in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marketingdepartment.ch1 -
Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?
Hey Everyone, I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest. For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc). In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option. However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _JediMindBender
JMB0 -
Traffic exchange referral URL's
We have a client who once per month is being hit by easyihts4u.com and it is creating huge increases in their referrals. All the hits go to one page specifically. From the research we have done, this site and others like it, are not spam bots. We cannot understand how they choose sites to target and what good it does for them, or our client to have hits all on one days to one page? We created a filter in analytics to create what we think is a more accurate reflection of traffic. Should be block them at the server level as well?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Teamzig0 -
Does type of hosting affect SEO rankings?
Hello, I was wondering if hosting on shared, versus VPS, versus dedicated ... matter at all in terms of the rankings of Web sites ... given that all other factors would be exactly equal. I know this is a big question with many variables, but mainly I am wondering if, for example, it is more the risk of resource usage which may take a site down if too much traffic and therefore make it un-crawlable if it happens at the moment that a bot is trying to index the site (factoring out the UX of a downed site). Any and all comments are greatly appreciated! Best regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uworlds
Mark0 -
Website starts ranking on Google then always drops - Targeted for Australia but most traffic from U.S - Bounce Rate at 94.49% - HELP!
Hi everyone, Thank you for your time. During the past 8 months I have been working on this website which is a .com.au . I have fully optimised the website which is targeting Brisbane in Australia and I have setup everything (Sitemaps, Geo location on WMT, Fetched as Google etc..) However the website just does not want to rank at all. I know that the previous SEO company were not too good but since then I have disavowed all unnatural links, we have moved the hosting to a new company and the website content has been updated. Only recently the Website has started ranking for it's brand name (not even in top of Google) and whenever a keyword starts ranking above the Top 50 of Google it suddenly drops again. The other issues is that even if I have setup the website to target Australia the majority of traffic comes from the U.S. Last month out of the 127 Session - 85 from United States - 29 from Australia - 3 Brazil - 2 India - 2 Italy - 1 Canada etc... Because of this the website has a Bounce rate of 95%. If you would have any advice, tips or recommendations that I could do to try and fix this it would be much appreciated. I suppose we can consider this as some kind of penalisation - potentially due to the past work and issues that occurred before the business became our client but I am not sure what more I can do to stop the wrong traffic and improve the rankings. Thanks for your help. Lyam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AlphaDigital20 -
Will two numbers on a local listing affect me?
The reason I'm asking this question is. I was on the phone with a Google Rep yesterday for one of my google places. It was in reference to map maker and the fact that I only wanted one number on the listing. About a month ago I had it, so I deleted the listing's local number and than had an 877 number. The problem is when I checked on Friday the Local number was then added back by a Google moderator in Map Maker. So, now there's two numbers on the listing. He told me that would not affect my NAP info, which I don't believe.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterRota
He also went on to say that Google goes through listings and if they have an 800 number they may delete it and replace place it with a local number. Has anyone delt with this and can Verify what he says to be true? Additionally, will my NAP be affected if this is the case? Thanks.0 -
Is it possible that since the Google Farmer's Update, that people practicing Google Bowling can negatively affect your site?
We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dahnyogaworks0 -
What does Youtube Consider Duplicate content and will it effect my ranking/traffic?
What does youtube consider duplicated content? If I have a power point type video that I already have on youtube and I want to change the beginning and end call to action, would that be considered duplicate content? If yes then how would this effect my ranking/youtube page. Will it make a difference if I have it embedded on my blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christinarule0