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.
Rel canonical between mirrored domains
-
Hi all & happy new near!
I'm new to SEO and could do with a spot of advice:
I have a site that has several domains that mirror it (not good, I know...) So www.site.com, www.site.edu.sg, www.othersite.com all serve up the same content. I was planning to use rel="canonical" to avoid the duplication but I have a concern:
Currently several of these mirrors rank - one, the .com ranks #1 on local google search for some useful keywords. the .edu.sg also shows up as #9 for a dirrerent page. In some cases I have multiple mirrors showing up on a specific serp.
I would LIKE to rel canonical everything to the local edu.sg domain since this is most representative of the fact that the site is for a school in Singapore but...
-The .com is listed in DMOZ (this used to be important) and none of the volunteers there ever respoded to requests to update it to the .edu.sg
-The .com ranks higher than the com.sg page for non-local search so I am guessing google has some kind of algorithm to mark down obviosly local domains in other geographic locationsAny opinions on this? Should I rel canonical the .com to the .edu.sg or vice versa?
I appreciate any advice or opinion before I pull the trigger and end up shooting myself in the foot!
Best regards from Singapore!
-
Wow - that's a huge impact. It's hard for me to believe this one change would have such an impact, but hopefully these new numbers stick.
-
Hi Dr. Peter,
Just thought I would share the initial results of your suggestion because they appear to be so dramatic!
I put it a rel=alternate tag on every page indicating the .edu.sg version of the URL for "en-sg" and the com version of the url for "en".
From MozAnalytics: Before
Rank 1-3: 4 keywords
Rank 4-10: 21 keywords
Rank 11-20: 3 keywords
Rank 21-50: 2 keywords
Rank 51+: 216 keywordsFrom MozAnalytics: After
Rank 1-3: 50 keywords!!!
Rank 4-10: 19 keywords
Rank 11-20: 3 keywords
Rank 21-50: 13 keywords
Rank 51+: 167 keywordsThat's pretty crazy in under a week - Not sure if its 'real' since I never personally went to check rankings on these keywords, but wow! If the MozAnalytics information is correct I am blown away! Unfortunately its for a niche site in a tiny market so its not going to lead to fame and riches, but its still an amazing result!
Thanks so much for the great advice
Alex
-
Happy to help - hope it does the trick.
-
Fantastic response Dr. Peter! Thanks for taking the time to explain and to suggest the rel="alternate" tag which I have now implemented in a little experiment.
I very much enjoy your posts on the moz blog and thank you for all the indirect help they have given us in the past.
Best regards,
Alex
-
I'm not sure there's a one-sized-fits-all answer. If the .com is more geared to an audience outside of Singapore, and the .edu.sg site is more geared to the local audience you could set a region and/or language with rel="alternate" hreflang:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
This is a bit more subtle canonicalization signal that Google can use to sort out sites with language and/or regional copies (the regional aspect may be relevant even if both sites are in english).
The next question would be: where does your traffic come from? If you want to consolidate, but most of your traffic is coming from outside of Singapore, then I'd probably stick with the .com - it still has a "generic" status. The .edu.sg may rank more strongly in Singapore but fall off everywhere else.
I wouldn't worry much about the DMOZ link, especially if you have a solid link profile. DMOZ links have gotten buried over the years and typically don't carry nearly the value most people think. At some point, they could be a solid boost to a new site with a small link profile, but I think even those days are well behind us.
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
-
Canonical or hreflang?
I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like: or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site? I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.
Technical SEO | Aug 23, 2022, 9:41 AM | andrew-mso0 -
Redirect multiple domains to 1 domain or not?
Hi there, I have client who has multiple domains that already have some PA and DA. Problem is that most websites have the same content and rank better on different keywords.
Technical SEO | Apr 7, 2021, 6:30 PM | Leaf-a-mark
I want to redirect all the websites to 1 domain because it’s easier to manage and it removes any duplicate content. Question is if I redirect domain x to domain y do the rankings of domain x increase on domain y? Or is it better to keep domain x separately to generate more referral traffic to domain y? Thanks in advance! Cheers0 -
Redirect typo domains
Hi, What's the "correct" way of redirecting typo domains? DNS A record goes to the same ip address as the correct domain name Then 301 redirects for each typo domain in the .htaccess Subdomains on typo urls still redirect to www or should they redirect to the subdomain on the correct url in case the subdomain exists?
Technical SEO | Jul 10, 2015, 12:18 PM | kuchenchef0 -
Rel=canonical Weebly
My problem is with my website as it says I have duplicate page titles and contents because of a /index.html. It says the duplicate content is due to the fact that my homepage on my website is www.seacandytackle.com but it is also www.seacandytackle.com/index.html because I use weebly. How can I use the tag to fix this? It won't let me do a 301 redirect because it is a home page. How can I fix this? What code would I have to use and which url? Also it says that I have duplicate page content between http://www.seacandytackle.com/index.html and http://www.seacandytackle.comhttp://www.seacandytackle.com but I don't recall having any page that looks like http://www.seacandytackle.com http://www.seacandytackle.com from weebly. How can I fix this issue as well? Thank you for any help. Step by step implementation would be particularly helpful in using the rel= tags to fix these duplicate issues.
Technical SEO | Oct 30, 2015, 7:00 PM | SeaCandyTackle0 -
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
Hi, Newbie alert! I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly. The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags. Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new? Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case? Thx in anticipation.
Technical SEO | Nov 10, 2014, 8:08 PM | ztalk1120 -
Rel=Canonical on a page with 302 redirection existing
Hi SEOMoz! Can I have the rel=canonical tag on a URL page that has a 302 redirection? Does this harm the search engine friendliness of a content page / website? Thanks! Steve
Technical SEO | May 24, 2012, 1:17 AM | sjcbayona-412180 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | Apr 13, 2012, 7:13 PM | JohannCR0 -
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 | Oct 18, 2011, 8:56 AM | bThere0