Cross domain canonical for different branded sites
-
Hi everyone,
We are working on 5 websites that offer the same products but are of different brands and locations. They are owned by the same company, but each run independently. On the sites, they have content such as privacy policies, terms and conditions and guides that are the same across all brands. Will publishing these be flagged as duplicate content by Google? If yes, is it recommended to add rel=canonical to all duplicate pages across all sites pointing to one of the five?
We are just concerned that the 4 sites with duplicate content would be valued less than the canonical as a result of passed link equity. We are doing SEO optimisations for all and are trying to rank them well in SERPs.
If a canonical is not the best solution here, what would be the best to do apart from completely rewriting content? Is it noindex tag or turning the texts into images and adding to PDFs?
Thank you.
-
Perfect, thanks for sharing the link!
-
Thanks for this! We won't be worrying about the T&Cs and such and will try to rewrite the product pages as we work on SEO on these individual brands and are trying to rank them all in their respective locations.
-
Rand covered rel=canonical used cross-domain as today's WhiteBoard Friday topic.
https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content
-
For pages like T&C etc. I wouldn't use canonicals. It is perfectly normal that all websites have pages like T&C, privacy policy and so on, and even when the websites aren't owned by the same company, they are usually quite similar. I would simply leave them as they are. You will not be penalised for duplicate content, but Google may choose to show only one of the results in organic search results.
If someone was to google "website 1 terms and conditions", Google should still choose to show the T&C of website 1 as an organic result. If you used canonicals, where website 5 is used as the canonical, you would probably have website 5 shown no matter which T&C a person is trying to find.
For product pages, you should be using different content (product descriptions) to avoid this issue. However, we have the same situation, where we have some products sold across more than one website, but we actually only want one of them to rank, so we have used cross-domain canonicals for those products. It has worked really well for 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
-
Approach for an established site looking to serve different content to regions in a single country/lang
Hi guys, I have an established site that currently serves the same content to all regions - west and east - in a single country with the same language. We are now looking to vary the content across west and east regions - not dramatically, but the products offered will be slightly different. From what i gather, modifying the url is best for countries, so feels like overkill for regions within the same country. I'm also unlikely to have very unique content, outside of the varied products, so I'm mindful of duplicate/similar content, but I know I can use canonical tags to address. I have a fairly modern CMS that can target content based on region, but mindful of upsetting Google re; showing different content to what the bot might encounter, assuming this is still a thing. So, three questions from an SEO perspective - Do i need to really focus on changing my url structure, especially as I'm already established in a competitive market, or will I do more harm than good? Is the region in the URL a strong signal? If I should make some changes to the url and/or metadata, what are the best bang for buck changes you would make? How does Google Local fit into this? Is it a separate process via webmaster tools, or does it align to the above changes? Cheers!!! Jez
Technical SEO | | jez0000 -
Add translated content on different domain or not?
Hello, I currently have my dutch website in the domain of my country. Quite good SEO positions are there for this language. Now, i'd like to translate my full site to english, my target group would go over the whole world because i'm delivering an online service. Therefore, I don't think it's good to have this on my country domain? I have an identic .EU domain that's never been used (currently redirecting). What's the best choice? What are the + and - ? Could this have any effect on my current positions in dutch (homecountry domain) ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
I've consolidated other domains to a single one with 301 redirects, yet the new domain authority in MOZ is much less that the redirected ones. Is that right?
I'm trying to increase the domain authority of my main site, so decided to consolidate other sites. One of the other sites has a much higher domain authority, but I don't know why after a 301 redirect, the new site's domain authority hasn't changed on over a month. Does MOZ take account of thes types of things?
Technical SEO | | bytecgroup2 -
Canonical: Is this a problem?
Hi!!
Technical SEO | | petrospan
I am running a small wordpress website and i have a question because i am a litle confusic about Rel Canonical notices in the crawl diagnostics! I have the seo by yoast and i have fix all the canonical url for my page, but i take notices. I must worried about it or is something that inform me that everyting is ok? rel.jpg rel.jpg0 -
Redirect non www. domain to WWW. domain for established website?
Hey guys, The website in question has been online for more than 5 years but there are still 2 versions of the website. Both versions are indexed by Google and of course, this will result in duplicate content. Is it necessary to redirect the non-www domain to the www. domain. What are the cons and advantages? Will the www. links replace the non-www links when it comes to keyword rankings? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Pros & Cons of deindexing a site prior to launch of a new site on the same domain.
If you were launching a new website to completely replace an older existing site on the same domain, would there be any value in temporarily deindexing the old site prior to launching the new site? Both have roughly 3000 pages, will launch on the same domain but have a completely new url structure and much better optimized for the web. Many high ranking pages will be redirected with 301 to the corresponding new page. I believe the hypothesis is this would eliminate a mix of old & new pages from sharing space in the serps and the crawlers are more likely to index more of the new site initially. I don't believe this is a great strategy, on the other hand I see some merit to the arguments for it.
Technical SEO | | medtouch0 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140