Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Save 36% now!
      Moz Pro

      Save 36% now!

      Sign up
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Save 36% now!
      Moz Pro

      Save 36% now!

      Sign up
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Cross Canonicalization for domains with same menu

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Cross Canonicalization for domains with same menu

    Technical SEO
    sharing menu items
    2
    2
    137
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Shrine.SEO.Gal
      Shrine.SEO.Gal Subscriber last edited by

      I have a client who took 3 pages from its main website and made them into their own domains. So that now, for example,
      www.mainsite.com/page
      redirects to
      www.page.com

      This is so users can be given access to the content on that specific page with ease.
      Now, www.page.com has the same menu items as www.mainsite.com, so that users who select the menu items on www.page.com will be circled back to the main site.

      But this means that there are now different URLs for these pages.
      ie:
      On www.mainsite.com there is: www.mainsite.com/menu-item
      (the content resides here)

      And on www.page.com there is: www.page.com/menu-item
      (Which is basically "scaffolding" to support the page and a means to get around, so to speak.This is to make any and all pages accessible at either domain. ) I have only seen this type of URL on the Moz campaign crawl. In the real world, when a user selects a menu item from the www.page.com, it will circle back to www.mainsite.com/menu-item

      SEO-wise, should I use cross-canonicalization to point www.page.com/menu-item to www.mainsite.com/menu-item? Or would this be splitting hairs since these are only seen on the Moz crawl?

      CloutsySMM 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • CloutsySMM
        CloutsySMM @Shrine.SEO.Gal last edited by

        @Shrine-SEO-Gal said in Cross Canonicalization for domains with same menu:

        I have a client who took 3 pages from its main website and made them into their own domains. So that now, for example,
        www.mainsite.com/page
        redirects to
        www.page.com
        This is so users can be given access to the content on that specific page with ease.
        Now, www.page.com has the same menu items as www.mainsite.com, so that users who select the menu items on www.page.com will be circled back to the main site.
        But this means that there are now different URLs for these pages.
        ie:
        On www.mainsite.com there is: www.mainsite.com/menu-item
        (the content resides here)
        And on www.page.com there is: www.page.com/menu-item
        (Which is basically "scaffolding" to support the page and a means to get around, so to speak.This is to make any and all pages accessible at either domain. ) I have only seen this type of URL on the Moz campaign crawl. In the real world, when a user selects a menu item from the www.page.com, it will circle back to www.mainsite.com/menu-item
        SEO-wise, should I use cross-canonicalization to point www.page.com/menu-item to www.mainsite.com/menu-item? Or would this be splitting hairs since these are only seen on the Moz crawl?

        For SEO, using cross-canonical tags would help consolidate authority and avoid potential duplication issues, even though the structure is primarily for navigation and redirecting users to the main site. Adding canonicals from www.page.com/menu-item to www.mainsite.com/menu-item signals to search engines that the main version resides on the main site, which is helpful in the long term.

        Since these URLs show up only in Moz crawls, this isn’t an urgent issue, but canonicalization helps clarify the content's primary source if search engines eventually pick up on www.page.com/menu-item. You might also want to set up redirects on these scaffold URLs if they don’t need to be indexed separately, which can further ensure consistency.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • 1 / 1
        • First post
          Last post

        Got a burning SEO question?

        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


        Start my free trial


        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.

        • See all categories

        Related Questions

        • coolhandluc

          English and French under the same domain

          A friend of mine runs a B&B and asked me to check his freshly built website to see if it was <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> compliant. 
          The B&B is based in France and he's targeting a UK and French audience. To do so, he built content in english and french under the same domain:
          https://www.la-besace.fr/ When I run a crawl through screamingfrog only the French content based URLs seem to come up and I am not sure why. Can anyone enlighten me please? To maximise his business local visibility my recommendation would be to build two different websites (1 FR and 1 .co.uk) , build content in the respective language version sites and do all the link building work in respective country sites. Do you think this is the best approach or should he stick with his current solution? Many thanks

          Technical SEO | | coolhandluc
          1
        • SeaDrive

          Redirect root domain to www

          I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below.   Does anyone have a solution to this?  I'm not 100% sure what to do.  Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not?  Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com  which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks

          Technical SEO | | SeaDrive
          0
        • unibiz

          How to do ip canonicalization ?

          Hi , my website is opening with IP too.  i think its duplicate content for google...only home page is opening with ip, no other pages,  how can i fix it?,  might be using .htaccess i am able to do...but don't know proper code for this...this website is on wordpress platform... Thanks Ramesh

          Technical SEO | | unibiz
          0
        • media-surfer

          Umlaut in domain

          Hi, My client wants to expand it's business to Germany and logically we need a domain name to match. We've found a great one and regsiterd several variants to it. However I just found out that in Germany it is possible (while here it's not) to register a domain with an umlaut. My question is: will google assign more value to: schädlinge.de than schadlinge.de when users search for schädlinge? If yes, how large will the difference be? (I will use an umlaut in the title etc) Kind regards,
          Jason.

          Technical SEO | | media-surfer
          0
        • GAZ09

          How to increase your Domain Authority

          Hi Guys, Can someone please provide some pointers on how to best increase your Domain Authority?? Thanks Gareth

          Technical SEO | | GAZ09
          0
        • bThere

          Subdomain and Domain Rankings

          I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league)  when searching for "monkey fights" There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment. Question 1. Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus? Question 2. If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time Thanks

          Technical SEO | | bThere
          0
        • fthead9

          What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?

          Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
          User-agent: *
          Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.

          Technical SEO | | fthead9
          0
        • briankb

          301 Redirect vs Domain Alias

          We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?

          Technical SEO | | briankb
          0

        Get started with Moz Pro!

        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

        Start my free trial
        Products
        • Moz Pro
        • Moz Local
        • Moz API
        • Moz Data
        • STAT
        • Product Updates
        Moz Solutions
        • SMB Solutions
        • Agency Solutions
        • Enterprise Solutions
        • Digital Marketers
        Free SEO Tools
        • Domain Authority Checker
        • Link Explorer
        • Keyword Explorer
        • Competitive Research
        • Brand Authority Checker
        • Local Citation Checker
        • MozBar Extension
        • MozCast
        Resources
        • Blog
        • SEO Learning Center
        • Help Hub
        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
        • How-to Guides
        • Moz Academy
        • API Docs
        About Moz
        • About
        • Team
        • Careers
        • Contact
        Why Moz
        • Case Studies
        • Testimonials
        Get Involved
        • Become an Affiliate
        • MozCon
        • Webinars
        • Practical Marketer Series
        • MozPod
        Connect with us

        Contact the Help team

        Join our newsletter
        Moz logo
        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
        • Accessibility
        • Terms of Use
        • Privacy

        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.