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
-
Can affiliate links affect DA?
Hey guys, over the past two months my DA has gone down from 17 to 12, and I have no dura what could have caused it. I started putting in some Amazon affiliate links in my posts - could that be the reason why? Also, I have about 30 backlinks from a blog with a spam score of 11% - could this also be affecting it in any way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmyAed0 -
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH0 -
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 -
Sudden Drop in Website Traffic Last month
Can any one help me. One of my website http://www.imperialcard.com.au/ suddenly started to drop in traffic and ranking. I havent done anything black hat. How do I figure out what caused this. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Verve-Innovation0 -
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 -
Will two numbers on a local listing affect me?
The reason I'm asking this question is. I was on the phone with a Google Rep yesterday for one of my google places. It was in reference to map maker and the fact that I only wanted one number on the listing. About a month ago I had it, so I deleted the listing's local number and than had an 877 number. The problem is when I checked on Friday the Local number was then added back by a Google moderator in Map Maker. So, now there's two numbers on the listing. He told me that would not affect my NAP info, which I don't believe.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterRota
He also went on to say that Google goes through listings and if they have an 800 number they may delete it and replace place it with a local number. Has anyone delt with this and can Verify what he says to be true? Additionally, will my NAP be affected if this is the case? Thanks.0 -
For traffic sent by the search engines, how much personalization/customization is allowed on a page if any?
If I want to better target my audience so I would like to be able to address the exact query string coming from the search engine. I'd also like to add relevant sections to the site based in the geo area they live in. Can I customize a small portion of the page to fit my visitors search query and geo area per the IP address? How much can I change a web page to better fit a user and still be within the search engine's guidelines?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Thos0030 -
Is it possible that since the Google Farmer's Update, that people practicing Google Bowling can negatively affect your site?
We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dahnyogaworks0