Is this an ideal rel=canonical situation?

[ColeLusby]

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

[JaneCopland]

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.

[ColeLusby]

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

[GPainter]

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.