Duplicate content: using the robots meta tag in conjunction with the canonical tag?
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We have a WordPress instance on an Apache subdomain (let's say it's blog.website.com) alongside our main website, which is built in Angular. The tech team is using Akamai to do URL rewrites so that the blog posts appear under the main domain (website.com/more-keywords/here). However, due to the way they configured the WordPress install, they can't do a wildcard redirect under htaccess to force all the subdomain URLs to appear as subdirectories, so as you might have guessed, we're dealing with duplicate content issues.
They could in theory do manual 301s for each blog post, but that's laborious and a real hassle given our IT structure (we're a financial services firm, so lots of bureaucracy and regulation). In addition, due to internal limitations (they seem mostly political in nature), a robots.txt file is out of the question.
I'm thinking the next best alternative is the combined use of the robots meta tag (no index, follow) alongside the canonical tag to try to point the bot to the subdirectory URLs. I don't think this would be unethical use of either feature, but I'm trying to figure out if the two would conflict in some way? Or maybe there's a better approach with which we're unfamiliar or that we haven't considered?
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Hey there,
Try to avoid using both canonical and noindex, it is not advised (source: https://www.seroundtable.com/noindex-canonical-google-18274.html).
If you are using canonical on the subdomain it should be more than enough to deindex the subdomain version (if in any way it gets indexed) and resolve the duplicate content issue.
Greetings, Keszi
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