Same content on other domain owned by de company. Canonical is not working
-
Hi!
I am analyzing a website right now. It's a school, let's name it NEWSCHOOL. This school is owned by other school, let's name it, BIGSCHOOL
NEWSCHOOL is specialized in tourism degrees, and the BIGSCHOOL is a bigger and older one with a lot of different degrees.
What happens is that NEWSCHOOL has a course, let's name it TOURISM DEGREE.
BIGSCHOOL has that course too, with the same content, trying to help to promote the content, because this school is older, well known and has a consolidated brand internationally.BIGSCHOOL, has placed a canonical tag, telling Google that content comes from NEWSCHOOL.
What is happening is that the result of newschool is beeing omited by google. The first result is the BIGSCHOOL content, and then a lot of training portals, where the degree content is too to increase its visibility.
So, I would like to know, how can we do to say google that the content that it should show is the one of NEWSCHOOL and not the one in BIGSCHOOL. It's pretty clear that Google knows that those portals are closed related, because it is omitting the NEWSCHOOL results.
I know that we can send a link from the content area from one portal to the other in the content we want. But... would it solve the problem... and y we have to repeat that for each degree, woudn't it be a little dangerous?
Would like to know your points of view!
Thanks!
-
Thanks Everett, I agree that the best would be creating diferent content, but It is a little difficult, cause it is the explanation of the contents and programming of one course.
Thank you for your answer, and I will recomend publishing the content first in NEWSCHOOL and sending to the index before sending that content to other pages or portals!
-
The cross-domain rel canonical tag is a "hint" to Google, not a "directive". They can and do ignore it when other signals overwhelmingly indicate that a different page is the canonical one.
My advice would be to write new content for NEWSCHOOL.
If you can't do that, consider all of the different signals that Google can use besides the rel canonical tag:
- Initial publish date of the content
- Initial indexation date
- External links pointing to the content
- Internal links pointing to the content
- Domain authority (including domain-wide links)
- Age of the domain
- How the two pages are linking to each other
Last but not least you could noindex the BIGSCHOOL version, but not the NEWSCHOOL version and leave your cross-domain rel canonical tag up.
Again, it would be best to have unique content on both sites.
-
On my sites, if I have rel=caononical on Page A, referring to Page B (on another domain) as the source of the content, I do have a followed link from Page A to Page B. That link is in a sentence that says that the content was originally published on Page B on the other domain. I do not know if this is the way that Google would have done this, but this is what I have done and I can say that the results have been excellent. Page B does very well in the SERPs. (Page A is on a much more powerful website.)
-
Hi!
So, your point is to wait for that to happen, isn't it? What do you think about sending a link from the BIGSCHOOL course page to the NEWSCHOOL course page? I mean, canonical + link
Thank you!
-
Thanks Rebecca! I would probably go that way!
-
Thanks Umar!
What do you mean with ...
"I reckon your "New School" is not offering lots of degree courses so yes you can get the link from "Big School's" content but make sure, you are linking in a proper and natural way"
I woudn't be natural... cause both have the same owner...
-
I suggest lots of patience here. One of the goals of the rel=canonical is to have the ranking value of the BigSchool page passed to the new domain. If you simply do rel=canonical that will happen. If you use noindex, nofollow, robots, meta robots or anything else then you will take, by total chance, whatever google decides to give you.
I would be willing to sit for months on this if you are going to rel=canonical route.
-
You could noindex, follow the BIGSCHOOL tourism degree page.
-
I agree with Umar that BIGSCHOOL's overall authority is probably getting in the way. Is there any way to get a dofollow link from their course page to yours to help reinforce the linkage? Funneling a little extra juice your way certainly wouldn't hurt and it makes sense contextually.
-
It can take google a really long time to honor some rel=canonical. I have used some and it has taken many months for all of them to be honored.
-
Hey,
It seems that Google is giving respect to "Big School" because of it's overall authority. If you like to continue this approach, you might need to work on the overall authority of "New School" to get things straight.
Frankly speaking, I wouldn't go with this strategy as there are lots of other ways to leverage your new site from the old one. For instance, you may place the attractive banners at the "Tourism" page that point to your new school and stuff like that.
I reckon your "New School" is not offering lots of degree courses so yes you can get the link from "Big School's" content but make sure, you are linking in a proper and natural way.
For more details about canonical tags FAQs, please refer to this brilliant resource from Dr.Pete,
https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsHope this helps!
Thanks,
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
-
Domain Name redirection to new Domain Name - VS - Transfering Domaine Name from account 1 to account 2
Hi there! Thanks for your time 😉 I have a new cutsomer that bought his domain name via WIX and your know... WIX sucks huge time for SEO. Basically, we want to do SEO outside of WIX. But I am not sure HOW I should proceed. I think I have 2 options: OPTION 1- We transfer the domain name from WIX to a new hoster. But we will lose 7 days during that, lose prospects while the website is in maintenance and we might lose the little bit of ranking we have on the way. BUT! ONCE Everything is done with the transfer, we will be able to operate our SEO campaing with a Domain Name that as 15 domain authority, links, little bit a ranking, etc. OPTION 2- I just buy a new domain name. I build the new Website on it and then use the SEO juice from the old domain name with redirect to push the new domain name. Like this, I won't lose any opportunities. BUT I will have to restart the SEO as new... Any tips or ideas for me? Maybe there is an OPTION 3 that I don't know about.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gab-SEO1 -
Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs?
Hello. My question is:** Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs and a gTLD - and the gTLD is much more authoritative to begin with? ** I appreciate this is a very nuanced subject so below is a detailed explanation of my current approach, problem, and proposed solutions I am considering testing. Thanks for the taking the time to read this far! The Current setup Multiple ccTLD such as mysite.com (US), mysite.fr (FR), mysite.de (DE). Each TLD can have multiple languages - indeed each site has content in English as well as the native language. So mysite.fr (defaults to french) and mysite.fr/en-fr is the same page but in English. Mysite.com is an older and more established domain with existing organic traffic. Each language variant of each domain has a sitemap that is individually submitted to Google Search Console and is linked from the of each page. So: mysite.fr/a-propos (about us) links to mysite.com/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in French. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc) mysite.fr/en-fr/about-us links to mysite.com/en-fr/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in English. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc). There is more English content on the site as a whole so the English version of the sitemap is always bigger at the moment. Every page on every site has two lists of links in the footer. The first list is of links to every other ccTLD available so a user can easily switch between the French site and the German site if they should want to. Where possible this links directly to the corresponding piece of content on the alternative ccTLD, where it isn’t possible it just links to the homepage. The second list of links is essentially just links to the same piece of content in the other languages available on that domain. Mysite.com has its international targeting in Google Search console set to the US. The problems The biggest problem is that we didn’t consider properly how we would need to start from scratch with each new ccTLD so although each domain has a reasonable amount of content they only receive a tiny proportion of the traffic that mysite.com achieves. Presumably this is because of a standing start with regards to domain authority. The second problem is that, despite hreflang, mysite.com still outranks the other ccTLDs for brand name keywords. I guess this is understandable given the mismatch of DA. This is based on looking at search results via the Google AdWords Ad Preview tool and changing language, location, and domain. Solutions So the first solution is probably the most obvious and that is to move all the ccTLDs into a subfolder structure on the mysite.com site structure and 301 all the old ccTLD links. This isn’t really an ideal solution for a number of reasons, so I’m trying to explore some alternative possible routes to explore that might help the situation. The first thing that came to mind was to use cross-domain canonicals: Essentially this would be creating locale specific subfolders on mysite.com and duplicating the ccTLD sites in there, but using a cross-domain canonical to tell Google to index the ccTLD url instead of the locale-subfolder url. For example: mysite.com/fr-fr has a canonical of mysite.fr
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatello
mysite.com/fr-fr/a-propos has a canonical of mysite.fr/a-propos Then I would change the links in the mysite.com footer so that they wouldn’t point at the ccTLD URL but at the sub-folder URL so that Google would crawl the content on the stronger domain before indexing the ccTLD domain version of the URL. Is this worth exploring with a test, or am I mad for even considering it? The alternative that came to my mind was to do essentially the same thing but use a 301 to redirect from mysite.com/fr-fr to mysite.fr. My question is around whether either of these suggestions might be worth testing, or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and liable to do more harm than good?0 -
Will we be penalised for duplicate content on a sub-domain?
Hi there, I run a WordPress blog and I use [community platform] Discourse for commenting. When we publish a post to Wordpress, a duplicate of that post is pushed to a topic on Discourse, which is on a sub-domain. Eg: The original post and the duplicated post. Will we be penalised for duplicating our own content on a subdomain? If so, other than using an excerpt, what are our options? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ILOVETHEHAWK0 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Do links to a domain that re-directs to my domain pass link equity?
Hi guys. We've recently taken control of a third-party site and we're going to set up a domain re-direct so any traffic comes to our site. With any existing links that the third-party site has, will these pass link equity to our main site through the redirect? Thanks, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
The system shows duplicate content for the same page (main domain and index.html). Is this an error of SEOMOZ?
Should I be worried that this will affect SEO? Most sites redirect to the index.html page, right? [edited by staff to remove toolbar data]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moskowman0 -
Should I be using rel canonical here?
I am reorganizing the data on my informational site in a drilldown menu. So, here's an example. One the home page are several different items. Let's say you clicked on "Back Problems". Then, you would get a menu that says: Disc problems, Pain relief, paralysis issues, see all back articles. Each of those pages will have a list of articles that suit. Some articles will appear on more than one page. Should I be worried about these pages being partially duplicates of each other? Should I use rel-canonical to make the root page for each section the one that is indexed. I'm thinking no, because I think it would be good to have all of these pages indexed. But then, that's why I'm asking!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0
