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
-
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Duplicate content with URLs
Hi all, Do you think that is possible to have duplicate content issues because we provide a unique image with 5 different URLs ? In the HTML code pages, just one URL is provide. It's enough for that Google don't see the other URLs or not ? Example, in this article : http://www.parismatch.com/People/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112 The same image is available on: http://cdn-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize1-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize2-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize3-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg Thank you very much for your help. Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Julien.Ferras0 -
How do you reduce duplicate content for tags and categories in Wordpress?
Is it possible to avoid a duplicate content error without limiting a post to only one category or tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mivito0 -
Best tools for identifying internal duplicate content
Hello again Mozzers! Other than the Moz tool, are there any other tools out there for identifying internal duplicate content? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Meta canonical or simply robots.txt other domain names with same content?
Hi, I'm working with a new client who has a main product website. This client has representatives who also sells the same products but all those reps have a copy of the same website on another domain name. The best thing would probably be to shut down the other (same) websites and redirect 301 them to the main, but that's impossible in the minding of the client. First choice : Implement a conical meta for all the URL on all the other domain names. Second choice : Robots.txt with disallow for all the other websites. Third choice : I'm really open to other suggestions 😉 Thank you very much! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0 -
Rel canonical and duplicate subdomains
Hi, I'm working with a site that has multiple sub domains of entirely duplicate content. So, the production level site that visitors see is (for made-up illustrative example): 123abc456.edu Then, there are sub domains which are used by different developers to work on their own changes to the production site, before those changes are pushed to production: Larry.123abc456.edu Moe.123abc456.edu Curly.123abc456.edu Google ends up indexing these duplicate sub domains, which is of course not good. If we add a canonical tag to the head section of the production page (and therefor all of the duplicate sub domains) will that cause some kind of problem... having a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself? Is it okay to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to that same page? To complete the example... In this example, where our production page is 123abc456.edu, our canonical tag on all pages (this page and therefor the duplicate subdomains) would be: Is that going to be okay and fix this without causing some new problem of a canonical tag pointing to the page it's on? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How do I fix the error duplicate page content and duplicate page title?
On my site www.millsheating.co.uk I have the error message as per the question title. The conflict is coming from these two pages which are effectively the same page: www.millsheating.co.uk www.millsheating.co.uk/index I have added a htaccess file to the root folder as I thought (hoped) it would fix the problem but I doesn't appear to have done so. this is the content of the htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^millsheating.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.millsheating.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.millsheating.co.uk/ [R=301,L] AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonHegarty0 -
How to manage duplicate content?
I have a real estate site that contains a large amount of duplicate content. The site contains listings that appear both on my clients website and on my competitors websites(who have better domain authority). It is critical that the content is there because buyers need to be able to find these listings to make enquiries. The result is that I have a large number pages that contain duplicate content in some way, shape or form. My search results pages are really the most important ones because these are the ones targeting my keywords. I can differentiate these to some degree but the actual listings themselves are duplicate. What strategies exist to ensure that I'm not suffereing as a result of this content? Should I : Make the duplicate content noindex. Yes my results pages will have some degree of duplicate content but each result only displays a 200 character summary of the advert text so not sure if that counts. Would reducing the amount of visible duplicate content improve my rankings as a whole? Link back to the clients site to indicate that they are the original source Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0