Alternative to rel canonical?
-
Hello there, we have a problem.
Let's say we have a website www.mainwebsite.com
Then you have 40 websites like this:
www.retailer6.mainwebsite.com … an so on
In order to avoid the duplicate content penalty from Google we've added a rel="canonical" in each 40 sub-websites mapping each page of them to www.mainwebsite.com
Our issue is that now, all our retailers (each owner of www.retailer-X.mainwebsite.com) are complaining about the fact that they are disappeared from Google.
How can we avoid to use rel="canonical" in the sub-website and not being penalised by Google for duplicate content in www.mainwebsite.com?
Many thanks, all your advices are much appreciated.
YESdesign team
-
Does anyone have more suggestion/alternative strategies? Many thanks in advance.
-
Thank you Tom and Richard555.
-
Tom is very right - you cant have the best of both worlds with your current set up.
Your partners need to attract visitors on their site through content they write and publish - not yours.
All the best.
Richard
-
Your options are pretty limited, I'm afraid.
If you don't want to implement canonicals, then you're only alternative is to not have duplicate content. In which case, you and your retailers will need to rewrite and be unique.
To be honest, I would be pushing all your retailers to do this anyway. Not only will having their unique content help each subdomain rank easier, it should be remembered that the canonical tag is a suggestion to Google, not a directive/order. A very strong suggestion, it's worth noting, but not a 100% proof solution.
Unique content, on the other hand, is.
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
-
Duplicate pages and Canonicals
Hi all, Our website has more than 30 pages which are duplicates. So canonicals have been deployed to show up only 10 of these pages. Do more of these pages impact rankings? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Canonical page 1 and rel=next/prev
Hi! I'm checking a site that has something like a News section, where they publish some posts, quite similar to a blog.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
They have a canonical url pointing to the page=1. I was thinking of implementing the rel=next/ prev and the view all page and set the view all page as the canonical. But, as this is not a category page of an ecommerce site, and it would has more than 100 posts inside in less than a year, It made me think that maybe the best solution would be the following Implementing rel=next/prev
Keep page 1 as the canonical version. I don't want to make the users wait for a such a big page to load (a view all with more than 100 elements would be too much, I think) What do you think about this solution? Thank you!0 -
URL Parameters as a single solution vs Canonical tags
Hi all, We are running a classifieds platform in Spain (mercadonline.es) that has a lot of duplicate content. The majority of our duplicate content consists of URL's that contain site parameters. In other words, they are the result of multiple pages within the same subcategory, that are sorted by different field names like price and type of ad. I believe if I assign the correct group of url's to each parameter in Google webmastertools then a lot these duplicate issues will be resolved. Still a few questions remain: Once I set f.ex. the 'page' parameter and i choose 'paginates' as a behaviour, will I let Googlebot decide whether to index these pages or do i set them to 'no'? Since I told Google Webmaster what type of URL's contain this parameter, it will know that these are relevant pages, yet not always completely different in content. Other url's that contain 'sortby' don't differ in content at all so i set these to 'sorting' as behaviour and set them to 'no' for google crawling. What parameter can I use to assign this to 'search' I.e. the parameter that causes the URL's to contain an internal search string. Since this search parameter changes all the time depending on the user input, how can I choose the best one. I think I need 'specifies'? Do I still need to assign canonical tags for all of these url's after this process or is setting parameters in my case an alternative solution to this problem? I can send examples of the duplicates. But most of them contain 'page', 'descending' 'sort by' etc values. Thank you for your help. Ivor
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Exact Syntax for Canonical to PDFs for Windows Server
Hi There, I have got in my web several PDFs with the same content of the HTML version. Thus I need to set up a canonical for each of them in order to avoid duplicate content. In particular, I need to know how to write the exact syntax for the windows server (web.config) in order to implement the canonical to PDF. I surfed the web but it seems I cannot find this piece of info anywhere Thanks a lot!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Midleton0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Rel=Canonical to Longer Page?
We've got a series of articles on the same topic and we consolidated the content and pasted it altogether on a single page. We linked from each individual article to the consolidated page. We put a noindex on the consolidated page. The problem: Inbound links to individual articles in the series will only count toward the authority of those individual pages, and inbound links to the full article will be worthless. I am considering removing the noindex from the consolidated article and putting rel=canonicals on each individual post pointing to the consolidated article. That should consolidate the PageRank. But I am concerned about pointing****a rel=canonical to an article that is not an exact duplicate (although it does contain the full text of the original--it's just that it contains quite a bit of additional text). An alternative would be not to use rel=canonicals, nor to place a noindex on the consolidated article. But then my concern would be duplicate content and unconsolidated PageRank. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo0 -
How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content
I've attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section. Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com. Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages. I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up. This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me. I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deskstudio0 -
Is a 301 Direct with a canonical tag Possible ?
Hi All, Quick question , Are we correct in thinking that for any given URL it's not possible to do a 301 redirect AND a canonical tag? thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0