Can I redirect duplicate blogs to give credit to one?
-
I have two sites that have no duplicate content (yet). One ranks better than the other but has a crappy hyphenated domain name (Domain A), and the other one is the "brand site" with a better domain name (Domain B). I'm creating a blog with technical articles and corresponding videos. I want the videos to refer to the better domain name (Domain B) because I can't see referring people to a hyphenated domain (it would sound horrible). But, the hyphenated domain has a better chance of improving it's rankings (long story why). Can I duplicate the content and just use a canonical tag on Domain B to give the credit to Domain A? If I do that, is it done on each post? Or the blog's main page? What I think would happen is any links to Domain B would pass the juice to Domain A. Is that correct?
I know Canonical's are tricky and I don't want to screw this up, so I'd greatly appreciate some advice from the experienced people on here.
Thank you.
-
Thanks. You're right - I was making it to complicated so I just acquired an easier to remember domain that will 301 over to a single copy of the blog. I think putting a canonical on every post and hoping for the best would be, as you say, shooting myself in the foot.
Thanks for the help.
-
My gut reaction is that this is starting to sound too complicated, and you may be shooting yourself in the foot, but I don't understand the nature of the two sites, to be fair. I assume that they each have a unique role, since they currently have no duplicate content.
When it comes to canonical vs. 301-redirect, I think the core difference is what you want to have happen to users. A 301-redirect will take the user to the other site, whereas a canonical won't. If you essentially want to syndicate content to your own site, then a cross-domain canonical is a valid way to do that. This has to be done on the level of each individual post, though.
Google can ignore cross-domain canonical - it's just a hint, and definitely don't abuse it. For two sites, though, it should be reasonably effective. Again, the situation still sounds a little overly complex to me, and I can't say there's not a better solution, but I think the canonical is viable here.
-
Sorry - have to chime in here. Canonicals DO work cross-domain, and they often do pass link-juice, but it's somewhat at Google's discretion.
-
Thanks, and yes - I did over-complicate my explanation. There are a lot of articles out there about a cross-domain canonical, so I think it could be done, but maybe there's a simpler way to do this without duplicating content.
I want the authority to go to the hyphenated domain (it's higher ranked and I'm trying to push it a little further). So if MyDomainA/blog doesn't exist, but I add a 301 to send that to My-Domain-B/blog, what happens if there's a link to MyDomainA/blog? Would that still pass authority if the linked url (MyDomainA/blog) doesn't really exist?
Thanks again.
-
Hey PeachTree,
Sounds like you have a complicated situation there. However to answer your specific question, Canonical's only work for pages on the same domain, so it won't have any benefit.
You could 301 redirect pages from the hyphen domain to the equivalent page on the branded domain. This will pass the majority Authority of the hyphen domain to the brand site.
Hope that helps
Iain - Reload Media
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 Plugin: Redirecting or Rewriting?
Hey everybody! It's been a while since off the boards! I am reworking a site and I have been looking into their Redirection Plugin. I personally tend to lean towards just using the .htaccess because, well, why not. However, when looking deeper into the plugin I found myself a little confused with their redirection wording. RewriteRule ^/products/landing-page-october-2015/$ /products/special-education-news-october-2015/ [R=301,L] Is that the same thing as a classic Redirect 301?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
One site, two blogs, URL structure?
I address a two sided market: consumer research and school fundraising. Essentially parents answer research surveys to generate proceeds for their school. My site will have a landing page at www.centiment.co that directs users to two different sub-landing pages, one related to research and one related to school fundraising. I am going to create two blogs and I am wondering if I should run off one installation of wordpress.org or two? The goal here is to optimize SEO. Separate URL paths by topic are clean but they require two installations of wordpress.org www.centiment.co/research/blog www.centiment.co/fundraising/blog If were to use one installation of wordpress it would be www.centiment.co/blog and then I would have a category for fundraising and a category for research. This is a little simpler. My concern is that it will confuse google and damage my SEO given general blog posts about fundraising are far different then those about research. Any suggestions? Again I don't want to compromise my SEO as I'm creating a blog to improve my SEO. Any insights are much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurtw14
Kurt0 -
Webmaster is giving errors of Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags
Webmaster is giving errors of Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags after I changes the permalinks structure in wordpress. It there a quick fix for this and how damaging is the above for seo. Thanks T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Huge httaccess with old 301 redirects. Is it safe to delete all redirects with no traffic in last 2 months?
We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time. There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ? Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted? Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Currently, we manage a site that generates content from a database based on user search criteria such as location or type of business. ..Although we currently rank well -- we created the website based on providing value to the visitor with options for viewing the content - we are concerned about duplicate content issues and if they would apply. For example, the listing that is pulled up for the user upon one search could have the same content as another search but in a different order. Similar to hotels who offer room booking by room type or by rate. Would this dynamically generated content count as duplicate content? The site has done well, but don't want to risk a any future Google penalties caused by duplicate content. Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompucastWeb1 -
301 redirect
Hi there, I have some good links pointing to one of my web pages at the moment, however we are just about to launch a new design with new URL structure and I am clear that I need to do a 301 redirect on the URL to the new URL. However, do I keep the old URL live forever? or can I remove it after a while? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate Content / 301 redirect Ariticle issue
Hello, We've got some articles floating around on our site nlpca(dot)com like this article: http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html that's is not linked to from anywhere else. The article exists how it's supposed to be here: http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ (our other website) Would it be safe in eyes of both google's algorithm (as much as you know) and with Panda to just 301 redirect from http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html to http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ or would no-indexing be better? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0