Theoretical Canonical Query/Test
-
This is just a general discussion on your thoughts on this - maybe some tests have been done, but I haven't found any.
Suppose I have document X
If I put document X on high authority website A - It comes in SE position 1 for Keyword Z
If I put document X on low authority website B - It comes in SE position 10 for Keyword Z
What happens (if anything) if I put document X on website A and include a canonical tag to point to document X on website B.
What SE position would document Z on website B now come for Keyword Z ??
-
I've been working with the canonical tag for many issues since Feb 2009. I haven't tried this particular situation. It will most likely not rank document X on website B like it would on website A without canonical.
Since canonical translates to "i'm a copy of an existing page", then I guess that it would perform as if it was the documenton website B.
It is a whole different story if document X has been linked to from good pages on website A. If it ranks possition 1, then it is likely it is linked. This way you should be able to transfer some link juice. It is considered to pass on less than 301 redirect, which on its part is not passing the whole thing.
I look forward to some testing. I will try to see if I can do the experiment myself. This sounds like a good way to build links. That is if you can place the canonical link element on website A.
-
Is the real question - Does the cross-domain canonical tag pass domain and/or page metrics to the canonical page?
Yes, most likely
Check out this - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
However, to think about it more specifically.
Site A (DA:65, PA:35) ranks first for content Z. Site B (DA:20, PA:15) ranks 10th for content Z. Site A add a canonical tag to Site B, what happens?
- Site B will rank higher and Site A will drop out.
- Site A maintains it's rank and Site B will improve rank.
- Site A will drop in ranking and Site B will improve rank.
- No change to either site.
Most likely in my mind is 1 is most likely depending on how competitive the keyword is.
-
You can find tests carried out by the Dr. here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks
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
-
I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website is doing on google ranking
Hello, I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website (flyhy.co) is doing on google ranking and I have no clue why even though I have been doing my homework regarding SEO. Just a bit of background, I have created a new website about 6 months ago for the paragliding community, the primary goal is to provide a platform for people to publish their ads (osclass), but also to provide some interesting reviews and tools to help paragliders chose their wing. We have been putting a lot of effort to provide a nice user experience and tio build the tools mentioned above. Our main channel to connect with the community is Facebook, and we have been quite active there. I have looked at many SEO articles and I made sure the website provides a good UX, the URLs are SEO friendly, good meta data, etc. Also have been using the google search console and analytics to monitor all of this. But here is the thing, all these does not seem to change anything in our ranking for important keywords such as "paraglider for sale", "paragliding equipment", etc. We seem to only rank (looking at Google’s keyword tool) for very specific wing model names that people have mentioned in their ads. I have ran out of ideas on how to improve our SEO !!!!!! I know the website is only 6 months old, but by now we should get some results. As an example, I will mention one our main website competitors: www.paraglidingequipment.org. OK the URL is pretty obvious and this website ranks in page #1 for "paragliding equipment" (but also for "paraglider for sale" and other paragliding related key phrases). OK there is the URL (paraglidingequipment.org), but I thought nowadays google bots are smarter than just that. The website is 1 year old (so not really much older than us, and was ranking high anyway even 6 months ago). The website looks like it was clearly made by one person and then quickly just left it running, so no content has been added (except for people putting their ads), there is almost no activity on the Facebook account. I have run some test such as "pagespeed insights" and we both rank the same. On "seositecheckup.com", we are clearly better with more 10 points. Is there anyone out there who can tell me what is going on? Have I missed a very important aspect of SEO? Is our website somehow compromising the robots crawling (although I can see about 80 pages have been already indexed in google search console)? I know content is king, but in paraglidingequipment.org the only content I see are ads, and we have ads and other interesting (ie reviews and tools) for paragliders. To conclude, I am basically completely clueless of what to do to rank at least on the first couple of pages of google for the key phrases above. I need help. Hichem. PS: in Moz bar our score is non existing (PA=1,DA=10), on paraglidingequipment.org (PA=23,DA=15). So it looks that essentially we are not apparent on the web! PSS: We have also tried to build some backlinks on few important paragliding community websites.
Competitive Research | | hichemboudali0 -
Can you see if you have a penalty / downgrading for a keyword stuffed title tag ?
We’ve recently seen a gradual drop in organic listings for a site, the site has according to OSE the highest stats when compared to all its competitors. Im beginning to think the site may be being penalised for an unnatural title tag. The title tag for the site is as follows : [Service] [City] - [Company Name] - [Neighborhood] - West [City] An example of the above <title>pattern would be :</p> <p><strong>Garden Design London - Acme Design - Chelsea - West London </strong></p> <p>The other sites that are outranking this site have title tags like :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">#1 (INDUSTRY SITE)</span></p> </li> </ul> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#2 James Davidson Design, London</p> </li> </ul> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#3 Jane Smith : Luxury Garden Design | London | Garden Landscaping</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#4 Garden Designers London: BWI London Luxury Garden Design …</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#5 (NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ARTICLE)</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#6 Keers | High End Luxury Garden Designers in London</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#7 Garden Design London - Acme Design - Chelsea - West London (The site in question)</p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr">#8 Sarah Franklin | Luxury Garden Design | London</p> </li> </ul> <p> </p> <p>Looking down the list they all seem to be using less keyword stuffed <title> tags than our the site sitting in #7. Bearing in mind that the site in #7 out ranks in terms of stats all other sites apart from #1 and #4 (which aren't competitors) in OSE</p> <p>Is it possible to if the site in #7 was given a penalty for the <title> tag ?</p> <p><br />(please note that the <title> tags ive listed above are representative of what the other sites are using, but ive changed the service and city to obfuscate the sites)</p></title>
Competitive Research | | mike8780 -
2 sites with low DA and PA and unoptimised <title>outranking everyone for competitive search term - How ?</title>
Im doing some keyword research for a new client, Ive found 2 anomalies for competitive search terms where sites with unoptimised <title>tags, poor backlinks and other stats, (compared to the other sites listed in the SERP) are out ranking everyone and claiming the #1 spot</p> <p> The 2 search terms are :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=interior+designers+london&oq=interior+designers+london&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60j69i65l2j69i60.2784j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">Interior designers London</a>- #1 new-id.co.uk - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=new-id.co.uk&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a></p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=interior+designers+london&oq=interior+designers+london&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60j69i65l2j69i60.2784j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=interior+designer+london">Interior designer London</a>- #1 nstudio.co.uk - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnstudio.com%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a></p> </li> </ul> <p> (interestingly they hardly rank at all for any modification of those search terms)</p> <p> The only thing i could think of is that they both had some really good links using that exact anchor text, but ive been checking OSE for the past month both in the backlinks and the just discovered but couldnt see anything like that.</p> <p>I conducted the SERP checking from a laptop with a broadband connection based in London, although im not very local to either of these locations im about an 8th of the cities distance away from one of those location and about half a cities distance away from the other. So i dont think its a local skew thats causing the SERP rankings.</p> <p>For both sites i can see they had old domains which now redirect to the them :</p> <ul> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">New-id.co.uk = </span><span data-mce-mark="1"><a href="http://newidinteriors.com/">newidinteriors.com</a> - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnewidinteriors.com&no_redirects=1&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a> - PA1, DA1</span></p> </li> <li dir="ltr"> <p dir="ltr"><span data-mce-mark="1">Nstudio.co.uk = intarya.com - <a href="https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=www.intarya.com&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=">OSE info</a> - Da 32, PA43</span></p> </li> </ul> <p> Although the intarya domain was quite strong with good backlinks (but nothing above par comapred to the other sites the nstudio.co.uk site is now outranking, the anchor text was mostly natural with only some keyword anchor text from PA1 pages. </p> <p>The <a href="http://newidinteriors.com/">newidinteriors.com</a> didnt seem to have a backlink profile, both PA1 and DA1.</p> <p> Ive taken screenshots of the SERP pages below, but feel free to dig further</p> <p>Any idea what's going on here ?</p> <a download="HWkjmDf.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/HWkjmDf.png" target="_blank">HWkjmDf.png</a> <a download="A70jXse.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/A70jXse.png" target="_blank">A70jXse.png</a></title>
Competitive Research | | mike8780 -
Moz Rank /Moz Trust Tips and Tricks
I've been working on the following website (www.pleasantparkkennels.com) for about 2 years now for SEO and been able to place the site for many keywords. At times some competitors seem to come into the mix and 'just get lucky' in their rankings regardless of all the work I've done ... it seems they've implemented no SEO strategies whatsoever and yet them sometimes rank better. Upon comparing link metrics with these competitors, I seem to be doing well in most criteria but Moz Rank and Moz Trust always seems to be a category I fall short in.
Competitive Research | | MainstreamMktg
Does anyone have any resources / tips and tricks / checklists that I might be able review to assess my website for to see how I make it better. I'm running out of ideas 🙂 Thank you!0 -
My (properly optimised) webpage outscores page#1 ranked competitors on page/domain authority ... but I'm only on page#2\. Huh?
I'm puzzled. I've optimised a particular page for a particular search term, and the SEOMoz tool gives me an A for on-page optimisation. So no problem there. I can understand why my webpage/site is being outranked by pages from (for example) the Guardian and Oxford University, but there are several sites that Google is ranking on page #1 though their page and domain scores are well below ours. Specifically: my page/domain authority scores are 46/52, compared with 22/46 for the competitor that Google is ranking #5 - yet we only rank a lowly #12. And it's not as though the particular page in question isn't an obvious and appropriate part of our site. We work with new writers and the page in question offers a selection of creative writing courses. It's not like we're a writing-related site that suddenly has a page advertising fake rolexes. It's not a timing issue either, as most of our links have been in place for a couple of years at least. So I'm puzzled. And concerned. This page of ours was a reliable revenue generator for us and it's dying out there on the page#2 wilderness. If anyone can help, I'd be massively grateful. I don't know if this is helpful, but the page in question is http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Creative-Writing-Courses.html and the search term is ... well, heck, you take a wild guess. We're a British firm, so the only search engine that really matters to us is google.co.uk
Competitive Research | | harrybingham0 -
Local/Geo-Targeted SEO Keywords
Hey everyone, I work for a local jeweler who only has one store and wants to rank for geo-targeted and local results. We want to rank for "jewelry Minneapolis", "Minnesota engagement rings" and terms like that, since we're not an e-tailer we don't need to rank nationally... just in the MSP metro. I've been trying to find a service that has accurate search volume information for local search. I want to see how many searches are being conducted for various terms so I know where to focus our time and effort to rank for these terms. Does such a service exist? Or something that is more geared toward a strictly local strategy such as ours? Thanks in advance for all of your assistance! Jayme
Competitive Research | | jpretz0 -
Keyword difficulty/research question
Wondering if I could get some opinions from the fellow moz users' I have a website which I which to rank for the term 'evening dress'.As you can imagine it is a pretty difficult term with a score of 62% (the term gets 301,000 broad matches and 27,000 exact matches a month). As much as I would like to target this term I feel that my domain is not strong enough (DA 39) to match the competition. Therefore, would a better strategy be to target long tail keywords which also contain the primary keyword, ie black evening dress evening dress hire cheap evening dress buy evening dress online please note that these were just examples, I haven't researched a comprehensive long tail list. Would targeting these long tail keywords mean that a) I should be able to rank for them faster and thus receive more traffic, sooner, and b) build up links to the page which I ultimately want to rank for evening dresses with numerous backlinks containing the keyword evening dress. The trade off with doing this is that I would need to seo one page for all the long tail keywords to gain the maximum benefit for the 'money' keyword. Does this sound like a sensible approach to both ranking for big money term and also getting traffic sooner rather than later? Thanks Carl
Competitive Research | | Grumpy_Carl0
