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
-
Direct To Site Traffic Decline 2
This is an update on a post I made a few weeks ago. I notice a siginicant drop in direct traffic this year specifically from Chrome 43.0. I wanted to include data to get a deeper perspective. I have included data on the first 15 weeks of 2016 and 2017. It seems like a spam bot but I would like to hear other opinions. Thank you! pvg7ZPQ AleBZY9
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JMSCC0 -
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 -
Which one is highest Traffic Generation forum ?
Hello guys, can any one please suggest me Good highest Traffic Generation forum For Business. as there are many but i need best sites Which could generate Good traffic,As i am new to Forum posting. any export can help please. Thank you in advance, Falguni
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | innovativeecomindia0 -
Moving website and domain name without 301 Redirect or rel=canonical
I do not wish to draw attention to my company, so I am using code names. For the sake of this discussion, we are a new car dealership representing Brand X Cars. The manufacturer of Brand X Cars pushes its dealers toward a website hosting company called CarWebsites in order to maintain a level of quality and control with each dealer. However, we have found the platform to be too restricting, and are switching to our own WordPress site. Unfortunately Brand X is claiming ownership of our original domain, BrandXCarDealer.net, so we have switched to BrandXCarDealer.com (which we prefer anyways). Now both websites are running, and there is duplicate content of everything. Brand X is not cooperative and will not 301 redirect to the new site, and we do not have access to the of the website for a rel=canonical. Brand X is also dragging its feet on shutting down BrandXCarDealer.net. We do still have access to change the content of the pages on the BrandXCarDealer.net site, but that is pretty much as far as our control goes. So my question is, is there anything we can do, without using a 301 redirect or rel=canonical, to tell Google to pay attention to the new BrandXCarDealer.com rather than the old BrandXCarDealer.net? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VanMaster0 -
Canonical tags being direct to "page=all" pages for an Ecommerce website
I find it alarming that my client has canonical tags pointing to "page=all" product gallery pages. Some of these product gallery pages have over 100 products and I think this could effect load time, especially for mobile. I would like to get some insight from the community on this, thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JMSCC0 -
Substantial drop in organic traffic and keyword rankings
My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information. KDc8dMp fyVtrYo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kheberger0 -
Loss of 85-90% of organic traffic within the last 2 weeks.
Hey Everybody, Have a client that recently came to us asking for SEO help. Did some initial analysis on their current SEO status and most everything looked pretty good. On-page work was pretty good, nothing really lacking there other then missing alt tags for all images. Their linking profile looked good too. Lots of good links from quality sources, all relevant. Client has done some good press releases. They could probably use a bit more focus in their content as it is somewhat general and not keyword focused. Initially it didn't look like they needed any help with their SEO, so was a bit curious as to why they contacted us. Today we get their google analytics information and immediately noticed that they have had a 85-90 percent drop in organic traffic from all major search engines that started about two weeks ago. If all their SEO looks to be done properly, any ideas what would account for the massive drop in traffic? The only thing that looks like may have happened is that they may have dropped a couple spots from position #1 to position 2-3 for some of their highest traffic terms. Even if that is the case, I would not expect such a high drop off in terms of organic traffic. Just curious as to what anyone else can attribute the huge drop in traffic to or what else may help identify the issue. It's almost as if analytics was turned off or removed from the site, but that is not the case.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Changing domains from .net to .com after 7 month of traffic loss.
We are in business since 2005 and we always used the .net version as it was the only one available when we started. In about 2007 we bought the .com version to the person who owned it but we kept using the .net as customers were already used to that version. In January we started to see a SE traffic loss, not to mention being outranked by several sites (95% of those site spammers). We had no manual penalty but it could be an algorithmic, we are not sure if we even have some sort of penalty or is just that our niche is too spammed. We are now considering moving the site to the .com version as all our tries of increasing and regaining our ranks were useless (backlink cleanup, disavow tool usage, excellent link building, excellent content creation and social interactions). Our DA and PA are both higher that any of the other ages ranking on top. We have about 3k pages indexed. What do you guys think? Should we move the site to the .com? (note that the change is ranking-wise, not in terms of branding). And if we do, should we 301 all pages? or rel=canonical to avoid a possible "penalty flow" to the other domain? Note: for years, the .com version was/is 301 to the .net one. Thank you all!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FedeEinhorn0