Is this an ideal rel=canonical situation?
-
Hey Moz community,
Thanks for taking time to answer my question.
I'm working directly with a hospital that has several locations across the country. They've copied the same content over to each of their websites. Could I point the search engines back to a singular location (URL) using the rel=canonical tag?
In addition, does the rel=canonical tag affect the search engine rankings of the URLs (about 13 of them) that use the rel=canonical tag?
If I'm on track, is there an ideal URL (location) to decide has the original content?
This is actually the first time I've ever needed to use rel=canonical (if applicable).
Thanks so much.
Cole
-
Hi Cole,
Unfortunately there is a solution for this for international duplication but not national. If we were talking about international locations, the solution is the hreflang tag. I'll link to it here just in case it's of use in the future: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Nationally, canonicalisation will remove the non-canonical versions from the index and of course from rankings, as Chris has said.
I've looked at medical queries in the past, and Google is very adept at taking IP into account when returning results, the fact that it thinks my IP is located an hour's drive south of here notwithstanding
I would say that re-written content is your best bet if you can't use one page listing multiple locations (highly unlikely) and truly need separate sites for all 13. There can be a little cross-over / duplication without causing too much worry, but I would be concerned that Google is not good enough at a national level to differentiate between duplicates in the same way it can do this for internationalisation.
-
Hey Chris,
Thanks for the response.
I do not see any solutions here to be honest other than write the content over again.
Considering Google takes your IP Address location into consideration when you search a term such as "hospitals," I want each location to be able to rank for our list of target keywords. Thus, the rel=canonical may not be an option at this point.
Can anyone else comment on the ranking of pages (with duplicate content)?
Thanks again.
Cole
-
Hiya Cole,
Thanks for taking the time to write to us!
Well you can point them all to one site _but_the side affect of this would be the other sites might not rank, this could be problematic if e.g someone wanted to look for the content locally like "hospitals in London" (I'm not sure whats duplicated so use your imagination bit!). If you do implement the redirect across sites it's also a good idea to put a link on the page pointing towards the original content.
There is some great info on the tag here :
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
Other options that might help you is to rewrite the content, block the page in robots (bit harsh though). remove the content and just point the link to one but giving it a bit of a boost. 301 the users and bots to original content. I'm sure there are lots of other options and the choice is yours.
I hope some of that info will get you started, to be honest it may just be easier to use the tag along with just reiterating it with a link. This is helpful if you're not fussed by any index issues for the hospitals.
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
-
Sitemap and canonical
In my sitemap I have two entries for my page ContactUs.asp ContactUs.asp?Lng=E ContactUs.asp?Lng=F What should I use in my page ContactUS.asp ? Is this correct?
Technical SEO | | CustomPuck0 -
Canonical Page Question
Hi, I have a question relation to Canonical pages That i need clearing up. I am not sure that my bigcommere website is correctly configured and just wanted clarification from someone in the know. Take this page for example https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ Canonical link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ The Rel="next" link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?sort=bestselling&page=2 and this page has a canonical tag as rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2' /> Is this correct as above and working as it should or should the canonical tag for the second (pagination page) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2 in our source code be saying rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/' />
Technical SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
GWT Duplicate Content and Canonical Tag - Annoying
Hello everyone! I run an e-commerce site and I had some problems with duplicate meta descriptions for product pages. I implemented the rel=canonical in order to address this problem, but after more than a week the number of errors showing in google webmaster tools hasn't changed and the site has been crawled already three times since I put the rel canonical. I didn't change any description as each error regards a set of pages that are identical, same products, same descriptions just different length/colour. I am pretty sure the rel=canonical has been implemented correctly so I can't understand why I still have these errors coming up. Any suggestions? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Need Advice: How should we handle this situation?
Hi Folks, We have a blog post on one of our sites that ranked very highly for lucrative term for about a period of two months. It had over 2000 Facebook likes, about 20 tweets and the same amount of Google +1's. The post ended up receiving several high quality natural links, and we also pointed a few authoritative links to it from our network of sites. After we saw the ranking starting to slip we did a bit of link building (which we shouldn't have done) and ended up making a big mistake. The link building company was only supposed to do 30 links and they ended up doing 600. Once we figured it out, we immediately submitted a disavow request and told Google about our mistake. I also thought maybe we then had a manual spam penalty applied so I also submitted a reconsideration request (and also told them about our mistake) but got back a canned reply saying "no manual penalties" were found. After we did all that, we saw the rankings fall out of the top 50 with the next 10 days. I'm confident we can throw up a new similar blog post and see close the same rankings we experienced with the original post. But before I do that, I have two questions: Should we 301 the old post to the new post? Could that some how "pass" the bad rankings along to the new post? What should we do about the natural links we received? Should we try and reach out to the sites and get them to change their links to the new post? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn810 -
After I 301 redirect duplicate pages to my rel=canonical page, do I need to add any tags or code to the non canonical pages?
I have many duplicate pages. Some pages have 2-3 duplicates. Most of which have Uppercase and Lowercase paths (generated by Microsoft IIS). Does this implementation of 301 and rel=canonical suffice? Or is there more I could do to optimize the passing of duplicate page link juice to the canonical. THANK YOU!
Technical SEO | | PFTools0 -
Rel="Follow"? What the &#@? does that mean?
I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML? I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Showing duplicate content when I have canonical url set, why?
Just inspecting my sites report and I see that I have a lot of duplicate content issues, not sure why these two pages here http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/small-wholesale-patches-1/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch are showing as duplicate content when both pages have a clearly defined canonical url of http://www.thecheapplace.com/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch Any answer would be appreciated, thank you
Technical SEO | | erhansimavi0 -
Rel=author
Hi everyone, i'm trying to understand the rel=author thing for cotent, i need some clarification please. Firstly do you only use it for content on your site or can you have it for a guest post you have done on another domain which is not your own - linking to your author profile on your domain? Secondly implementing it, i understand it's 3 links: 1., Link on your content where the blog post is with a rel=author going to your domain authort page. 2., a link from your domain author page going to your google + profile. This is rel=me 3 a link on your google+ profile to your blog? if so how do i do this? i only have an option to edit about page and add recommended links? there is no 'contributor' section. I am UK profile also. Any help really appreciated, thanks guys.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0