Using canonical for duplicate contents outside of my domain

[MohammadSabbagh]

I have 2 domains for the same company,   example.com and example.sg

Sometimes we have to post the same content or event on both websites so to protect my website from duplicate content plenty i use canonical tag to point to either .com or .sg depend on the page.

Any idea if this is the right decision

Thanks

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, that's a lot more tricky. If you're trying to rank both the .com and .sg version for, let's say, US residents, and those sites have duplicate content, then you do run the risk of Google filtering one of them out. If you use canonical tags or something like that, then one site will be taken out of contention for ranking - in that case, you won't rank for both sites on the same term. The only way to have your cake and eat it too is to make the sites as unique as possible.

Even then, you're potentially going to duplicate effort and cannibalize your own rankings, so it's a risky proposition. In some cases, it may be better to try to promote your social profiles and other pages outside of your site that have some authority. It doesn't have to be your own site ranking, just a site that's generally positive or neutral.

[MohammadSabbagh]

Thanks Peter you answer has enrich the discussion

I think your suggestion is the proper way for different local domains versions of the same company or blog

My case is little different that actually lately i am trying to rank both of them in the seek of reputation management

It wasn't intended to be like that on the beginning but now we are trying to take advantage of our other local domain like .sg , .ch and .ae

[Dr-Pete]

Do you want the .sg site to only rank regionally in Singapore? You could use rel=alternate hreflang to designate the language/region for the two sites, and help Google more accurately know when to display which sites. This also acts as a soft canonicalization signal and tells Google that the pages are known duplicates:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

[DougRoberts]

Here's an article about rel=canonical where Dr. Pete answers some rel=canonical questions. With regards to rel=canonical passing PageRank he says:

"This is very difficult to measure, but if you use rel=canonical appropriately, and if Google honors it, then it appears to act similarly to a 301-redirect. We suspect it passes authority/PageRank for links to the non-canonical URL, with some small amount of loss (similar to a 301)."

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

At the end of the following Matt Cutts video (2:10), he says that there isn't a lot of difference between the page rank passing via rel=canonical and page rank passing a 301 redirect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

When it comes to the content of the page, yes, the two versions of the page should be pretty close to identical. I've seen Google refer to it as "highly similar". Here's what Google says:

"A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version. One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines."

See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

So, if your pages are too dissimilar then Google may ignore the rel-canonical "suggestion" and the "wrong page" or both pages may appear in Google's index.

[MohammadSabbagh]

i think this is useful resource that answer a lot of questions around canonical

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

[MohammadSabbagh]

Thanks Doug for your useful response

Just i need to clarify your sentence

"Be aware that the value of any inbound links to that article will be allocated to the canonical version. "

Do you mean canonical link is passing the page rank similar to 301 Redirect?

What if the 2 pages wasnt 100% identical ?

[Asjad]

Check this Video Out : http://moz.com/blog/handling-duplicate-content-across-large-numbers-of-urls

[DougRoberts]

Yes, this sounds absolutely correct.

You can check it's working by doing a search for some unique content in your article or using the query with the article's title:

site:{domain} "title"

If everything is working correctly you should only see the canonical version of the article in Google's index. (you can also use the inurl: to check too.

Be aware that the value of any inbound links to that article will be allocated to the canonical version. (This doesn't apply to social follows/likes though.) So think carefully about the audience for the article before deciding which version is canonical.

It may not apply in your case, but it can be a good idea to think about your readers too. By adding a link in the article to the other site, you can help to cross-promote them. You may find tat if some of your visitors find your cross posted article relevant and useful to them they may be more interested in other article on the source site.