Canonicals affected traffic?

[razasaeed]

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.

[razasaeed]

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

[razasaeed]

we take this step to not to get penalized

[StalkerB]

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.

[StalkerB]

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.

[kchandler]

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?

[razasaeed]

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?

[razasaeed]

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?

[kchandler]

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?

[Jinx14678]

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?