Cross-Domain Canonical and duplicate content
-
Hi Mozfans!
I'm working on seo for one of my new clients and it's a job site (i call the site: Site A).
The thing is that the client has about 3 sites with the same Jobs on it.I'm pointing a duplicate content problem, only the thing is the jobs on the other sites must stay there. So the client doesn't want to remove them. There is a other (non ranking) reason why.
Can i solve the duplicate content problem with a cross-domain canonical?
The client wants to rank well with the site i'm working on (Site A).Thanks!
Rand did a whiteboard friday about Cross-Domain Canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday -
Every document I have seen all agrees that canonical tags are followed when the tag is used appropriately.
The tag could be misused either intentionally or unintentionally in which case it would not be honored. The tag is meant to connect pages which offer identical information, very similar information, or the same information presented in a different format such as a modified sort order, or a print version. I have never seen nor even heard of an instance where a properly used canonical tag was not respected by Google or Bing.
-
Thanks Ryan, I didn't noticed that about the reply sequencing, and you're right, I read them in the wrong order. It makes much more sense now.
By "some" support, I meant that even Google via Matt Cutts says that they don't take cross domain canonical as "a directive" but rather a "hint" (and even that assumes Google agrees with you, that your pages are duplicates).
So the magic question is how how much authority do Bing and Google give the rel="canonical" and is it similar between the two engines?
-
One aspect of the SEOmoz Q&A structure I dislike is the ordering of responses. Rather then maintaining a timeline order, the responses are re-ordered based on other factors such as "thumbs-up" and staff endorsements. I understand the concept that replies which are liked more are probably more helpful and should be seen first, but it causes confusion such as in this case.
Dr. Pete's response on the Bing cross-canonical topic appears first, but it was offered second-to-last chronologically speaking. We originally agreed there was not evidence indicating Bing supported the cross-canonical tag, then he located such evidence and therefore we agree Bing does support the tag.
The statement Dr. Pete shared was that "Bing does support cross-domain canonical". There was no limiting factor. I mention this because you said they offered "some" support and I am not sure why you used that qualifier.
-
Ryan, at the end o the thread you linked to, it seems like both Dr. Pete and yourself, agreed that there wasn't much evidence of bing support. Have you learned something that changed your mind?
I know a rep from Bing told Dr. Pete there was "some" support, but what does that mean? i.e. Exactly Identical sites pass a little juice/authority, or similar sites pass **a lot **juice/authority?
Take a product that has different brands in different parts of the country. Hellmanns's and Best Foods for example. They have two sites which are the same except for logos. Here is a recipe from each site.
http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1
http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1
The sites are nearly identical except for logo's/product names.
For the (very) long tail keyword "Mayonnaise Bobby Flay Waldorf salad wrap" Best Foods ranks #5 and Hellmann's ranks #11.
I doubt they have a SEO looking very close at the sites, because in addition to their duplicate content problem, neither pages has a meta description.
If the Hellmanns page had a
[http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1](http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1)"/>I'd expect to see the Best Foods page move up and Hellmanns move down in Google. But would Bing appears to not like the duplicate pages as much, currently the Best Food version ranks #12 and the Hellmann doesn't rank at all. My own (imperfect tests) lead me to believe that adding the rel="canonical" would help in google but not bing.Obviously, the site owner would probably like one of those two pages to rank very high for the unbranded keyword, but they would want both pages to rank well if I added a branded term. My experience with cross-domain canonical in Google lead me to believe that even the non-canonical version would rank for branded keywords in Google, but what would Bing do?
I'd be very cautious about relying on the cross-domain canonical in Bing until I see some PUBIC announcement that it's supported. ``` -
I was bit confused when i read that. You put my mind to rest !
-
My apologies Atul. I am not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. Please disregard.
-
Thanks Ryan!
So it will be a Canonical tag
-
I would advise NOT using the robots.txt file if at all possible. In general, the robots.txt file is a means of absolute last resort. The main reason I use the robots.txt file is because I am working with a CMS or shopping cart that does not have the SEO flexibility to noindex pages. Otherwise, the best robots.txt file is a blank one.
When you block a page in robots.txt, you are not only preventing content from being indexed, but you are blocking the natural flow of page rank throughout your site. The link juice which flows to the blocked page dies on the page as crawlers cannot access it.
-
That is correct. If you choose to read the information directly from Google it can be found here:
-
Thanks!
It's for a site in the Netherlands and google is about 98% of the market. Bing is comming up so a thing to check.
No-roboting is a way to do it i didn't think about! thanks for that. I will check with the client.
-
Thanks Ryan!
So link is like:
On the site a i will use the canonical to point everything to site A.
-
You mean rel=author on site A ? How does it help ? Where should rel=author points to ?
-
According to Dr. Pete Bing does support cross-domain canonical.
If you disagreed I would first recommend using rel=author to establish "Site A" was the source of the article.
-
A cross-domain canonical will help with Google. (make sure the pages truely are duplicate or very close), however, I haven't found any confirmation yet that Bing supports Cross Domain Canonical.
If the other sites don't need to rank at all, you could also consider no-roboting the job pages on the other sites, so that your only Site A's job listings get indexed.
-
Yes. A cross-domain canonical would solve the duplicate content issue and focus on the main site's ranking.
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
-
Are backlinks within duplicate content ignored or devalued?
From what I understand, Googles no longer has a "Duplicate Content Penalty" instead duplicate content simply isn't show in the search results. Does that mean that any links in the duplicate content are completely ignored, or devalued as far as the backlink profile of the site they are linking to? An example would be an article that might be published on two or three major industry websites. Are only the links from the first website GoogleBot discovers the article on counted or are all the links counted and you just won't see the article itself come up in search results for the second and third website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Consult19010 -
Galleries and duplicate content
Hi! I am now studing a website, and I have detected that they are maybe generating duplicate content because of image galleries. When they want to show details of some of their products, they link to a gallery url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
something like this www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/101 where you can find the logotype, a full image and a small description. There is a next and a prev button over the slider. The next goes to the next picture www.domain.com/en/gallery/slide/102 and so on. But the next picture is in a different URL!!!! The problem is that they are generating lots of urls with very thin content inside.
The pictures have very good resolution, and they are perfect for google images searchers, so we don't want to use the noindex tag. I thought that maybe it would be best to work with a single url with the whole gallery inside it (for example, the 6 pictures working with a slideshow in the same url ), but as the pictures are very big, the page weight would be greater than 7 Mb. If we keep the pictures working that way (different urls per picture), we will be generating duplicate content each time they want to create a gallery. What is your recommendation? Thank you!0 -
Duplicate Content Dilemma for Category and Brand Pages
Hi, I have a online shop with categories such as: Trousers Shirts Shoes etc. But now I'm having a problem with further development.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
I'd like to introduce brand pages. In this case I would create new categories for Brand 1, Brand 2, etc... The text on categories and brand pages would be unique. But there will be an overlap in products. How do I deal with this from a duplicate content perspective? I'm appreciate your suggestions. Best, Robin0 -
Duplicate Content: Is a product feed/page rolled out across subdomains deemed duplicate content?
A company has a TLD (top-level-domain) which every single product: company.com/product/name.html The company also has subdomains (tailored to a range of products) which lists a choosen selection of the products from the TLD - sort of like a feed: subdomain.company.com/product/name.html The content on the TLD & subdomain product page are exactly the same and cannot be changed - CSS and HTML is slightly differant but the content (text and images) is exactly the same! My concern (and rightly so) is that Google will deem this to be duplicate content, therfore I'm going to have to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of all subdomain pages, pointing to the original product page on the TLD. Does this sound like the correct thing to do? Or is there a better solution? Moving on, not only are products fed onto subdomain, there are a handfull of other domains which list the products - again, the content (text and images) is exactly the same: other.com/product/name.html Would I be best placed to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of the product pages on other domains, pointing to the original product page on the actual TLD? Does rel cannonical work across domains? Would the product pages with a rel cannonical tag in the header still rank? Let me know if there is a better solution all-round!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Are all duplicate content issues bad? (Blog article Tags)
If so how bad? We use tags on our blog and this causes duplicate content issues. We don't use wordpress but with such a highly used cms having the same issue it seems quite plausible that Google would be smart enough to deal with duplicate content issues caused by blog article tags and not penalise at all. Here it has been discussed and I'm ready to remove tags from our blog articles or monitor them closely to see how it effects our rankings. Before I do, can you give me some advice around this? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_B
Daniel.0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Hey Everyone, I have a question regarding duplicate content. If your site is penalized for duplicate content, is it just the pages with the content on it that are affected or is the whole site affected? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi I installed a wiki and a forum to subdomains of one of my sites. The crawl report shows me duplicate content on the forum and on wiki. This will hurt the main site? Or the root domain? the site by the way is clean absolutely from errors. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
ECommerce products duplicate content issues - is rel="canonical" the answer?
Howdy, I work on a fairly large eCommerce site, shop.confetti.co.uk. Our CMS doesn't allow us to have 1 product with multiple colour and size options so we created individual product pages for each product variation. This of course means that we have duplicate content issues. The layout of the shop works like this; there is a product group page (here is our disposable camera group) and individual product pages are below. We also use a Google shopping feed. I'm sure we're being penalised as so many of the products on our site are duplicated so, my question is this - is rel="canonical" the best way to stop being penalised and how can I implement it? If not, are there any better suggestions? Also, we have targeted some long-tail keywords in some of the product descriptions so will using rel-canonical effect this or the Google shopping feed? I'd love to hear experiences from people who have been through similar things and what the outcome was in terms of ranking/ROI. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0