Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
-
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL.
Example:
Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask)
I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers)
Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up.
So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology?
I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!"So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?
-
Sadly I can't say for sure what the outcome will be given that it's mixed signals. There's honestly no way to know in advance what would happen either short term or over time as Google attempts to sort it out via other signals and cross-referencing factors.
-
So staying confined to my limitations except the robtots.txt file do you think I have better luck with this:
Using a rel=canonical for the next month and allowing the SE's to index as many of those new pages as possible, hoping they get as good of visibility as the old site, and then after a month robots out the old pages, to remove them from the SE's but 302 them to the new pages anyways just for consistency as far as a visitor is concerned.
-
As you likely already know, 302 says "keep this site/page indexed". So until and unless you find a way to help others in the organization grasp the significant damage that does, you're only applying band-aids that may or may not have some slight mitigating impact.
No matter what else you come up with, it's not going to be viable as far as bigger picture significant improvements to your dilemma. Instead, it causes search engines confusion at best, from which you may get lucky some of the time, until a competitor comes along and does things the right way.
This is because ultimately the 302 overrides canonical signals, which are not directives the way a 301 is a directive. So the 302 carries more weight in the evaluation process.
As such, education and dialogue involving company owners is going to be critical. When owners are able to grasp the issues at stake, developers then have no choice but to give up myopic control. Without that buy-in, you're in a losing battle from the gate.
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
-
Duplicate Content
Let's say a blog is publishing original content. Now let's say a second blog steals that original content via bot and publishes it as it's own. Now further assume the original blog doesn't notice this for several years. How much damage could this do to blog A for Google results? Any opinions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CYNOT0 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi there, Our client has an ecommerce website, their products are also showing on an aggregator website (aka on a comparison website where multiple vendors are showing their products). On the aggregator website the same photos, titles and product descriptions are showing. Now with building their new website, how can we avoid such duplicate content? Or does Google even care in this case? I have read that we could show more product information on their ecommerce website and less details on the aggregator's website. But is there another or better solution? Many thanks in advance for any input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality
Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site... what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Duplicate Content on Wordpress b/c of Pagination
On my recent crawl, there were a great many duplicate content penalties. The site is http://dailyfantasybaseball.org. The issue is: There's only one post per page. Therefore, because of wordpress's (or genesis's) pagination, a page gets created for every post, thereby leaving basically every piece of content i write as a duplicate. I feel like the engines should be smart enough to figure out what's going on, but if not, I will get hammered. What should I do moving forward? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Byron_W0 -
Press Release and Duplicate Content
Hello folks, We have been using Press Releases to promote our clients business for a couple of years and we have seen great results in referral traffic and SEO wise. Recently one of our clients requested us to publish the PR on their website as well as blast it out using PRWeb and Marketwire. I think that this is not going to be a duplicate content issue for our client's website since I believe that Google can recognize which content has been published first, but I will be more than happy to get some of the Moz community opinions. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aviatech0 -
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).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
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-friday0 -
Managing Large Regulated or Required Duplicate Content Blocks
We work with a number of pharmaceutical sites that under FDA regulation must include an "Important Safety Information" (ISI) content block on each page of the site. In many cases this duplicate content is not only provided on a specific ISI page, it is quite often longer than what would be considered the primary content of the page. At first blush a rel=canonical tag might appear to be a solution to signal search engines that there is a specific page for the ISI content and avoid being penalized, but the pages also contain original content that should be indexed as it has user benefit beyond the information contained within the ISI. Anyone else running into this challenge with regulated duplicate boiler plate and has developed a work around for handling duplicate content at the paragraph level and not the page level? One clever suggestion was to treat it as a graphic, however for a pharma site this would be a huge graphic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlooFusion380 -
Duplicate Content, Campaign Explorer & Rel Canonical
Google Advises to use Rel Canonical URL's to advise them which page with similiar information is more relevant. You are supposed to put a rel canonical on the non-preferred pages to point back to the desired page. How do you handle this with a product catalog using ajax, where the additional pages do not exist? An example would be: <colgroup><col width="470"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric_since1910.com
| .com/productcategory.aspx?page=1 /productcategory.aspx?page=2 /productcategory.aspx?page=3 /productcategory.aspx?page=4 The page=1,2,3 and 4 do not physically exist, they are simply referencing additional products I have rel canonical urls' on the main page www.examplesite.com/productcategory.aspx, but I am not 100% sure this is correct or how else it could be handled. Any Ideas Pro mozzers? |0