Canonicals affected traffic?
-
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are white label classified platform providers and recently we marked canonicals on all the partner sites pointing to our home site as authority because we thought that Search Engines might penalize us for duplicate content as the classified ads are similar on all site, only theme and layout is different but now we are witnessing a huge decrease in our partner`s classifed section organic traffic. Can you please advise that is it because of canonicals , if yes than what should we do? like should we take canonicals off and if we take it off than how can we handle it legally.
-
Dear Bary,
First i want to appreciate for the articles that you had send me. They were really helpful. Now in my case the constraint is that we can not change the content and because of this we have 2 issue.
1. We dont want that any of our partner gets cannibalized by the other partner. Actually after we have pointed canonicals the traffic of one of our partner has increased significantly and others has decreased in the same manner like atleast 5 times.
2. If we dont point canonicals than according to this article http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling- legitimate-cross-domain.html what is the LEGITIMATE way of handling it.
Regards
-
we take this step to not to get penalized
-
You don't really get 'penalized' for duplicate content.
If somebody is searching for content that is identical on 2+ different sites, then it may simply be that only one will be included in the SERPs, however you should not receive a penalty for having the same content.
If possible you should have some sort of differentiation between the sites though.
-
Almost definitely canonicals here. You might want to read this for when Dr. Pete did it for his own site - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization and now that Google take into account cross domain canonicals - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday - you're effectively saying that all those other sites ARE your site.
Only option is to take them off and (I assume by legal you simply mean best practise SEO) you don't actually have to do anything. If your site or another site ranks that's up to Google's algorithms. If you're not going to differentiate the content then there's not much else you can do.
-
Were you previously being penalized on these sites? For instance, did you have a good rank for your selected keywords then randomly drop off the first three SERPs? Or are you just trying to take steps to not be penalized?
-
we are white label classified platform http://ads.naitazi.com/ which is the parent company and we provide this portal to couple of other sites as well so that they can generate more visits and user engagement. examples are http://ads.koolmuzone.com/ or http://ads.shopaholic.pk/ . So now you can see that content and layout is same only color theme n header, footer is different. So pointed canonicals on all the Partner Sites to our site to avoid duplicate content penalization and to stay in white hat SEO. Please advise what should we do now?
-
Dear Kyle,
we are white label classified platform www.naitazi.com which is the parent company and we provide this portal to couple of other sites as well so that they can generate more visits and user engagement. examples are ads.koolmuzone.com or ads.shopaholic.com . So now you can see that content and layout is same only color theme n header, footer is different. So pointed canonicals on all the Partner Sites to our site to avoid duplicate content penalization and to stay in white hat SEO. Please advise what should we do now?
-
The drop in organic traffic for your partner's sites is directly related to the canonical links. Before i can give advice on how to solve the problem i first need to know, what is the reason for the duplicate content?
-
If canonical is the problem, Google could have seen what you describe as a way to try to funnel all the rank.
Much more info is needed such as...
How duplicate is the content, remember it must be very similar or exact. cross domain canonical is allowed (and actually boosted traffic in my case, but my content is EXACT duplicates and needed due to technical operations issues)
Have you made any other recent changes to your site structure or marketing tactics?
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
-
Large traffic loss, how to resolve?
So I have a few questions. A site which has dropped quite dramatically over the last month. There could be a few factors (less regular updates) been one. However, plenty of links spam has happened which some of which appears to be been pointed at an article. That article has been removed. We also disavowed 800+ links all of which had a spam score of between 100 and 40+ - they all looked ugly and irreverent such as forum spams, wallpapers spams, and junk. Is this the right move to make? What should the site do next? The current score is 4,000 SEMR. It was around 15,000 before. It's an aged site. Less effort is put into it now as the next site is here. Await your replys thanks. 3BCQNi3
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thewebpreneur0 -
Can affiliate links affect DA?
Hey guys, over the past two months my DA has gone down from 17 to 12, and I have no dura what could have caused it. I started putting in some Amazon affiliate links in my posts - could that be the reason why? Also, I have about 30 backlinks from a blog with a spam score of 11% - could this also be affecting it in any way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmyAed0 -
Direct To Site Traffic Decline 2
This is an update on a post I made a few weeks ago. I notice a siginicant drop in direct traffic this year specifically from Chrome 43.0. I wanted to include data to get a deeper perspective. I have included data on the first 15 weeks of 2016 and 2017. It seems like a spam bot but I would like to hear other opinions. Thank you! pvg7ZPQ AleBZY9
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JMSCC0 -
Site traffic halved not sure why
Hi guys, not sure if anyone can help, but we had a client's google organic traffic literally halve from the week at the end of August to September (29 Aug 2016 to be precise) and it hasn't recovered since (here's a screenshot from GA http://puu.sh/sAmd3/b071dd1e57.png) I've been doing a lot of digging around on Moz and elsewhere about any Google updates that may have gone through around that time and there doesn't seem to be anything that I would think would affect it. I thought it might be to do with Penguin, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A while ago before then we did have some domains and pages 301 redirected to the main site when multiple other sites were rolled into the one, but I wouldn't have thought that should affect it. After that I've also gone and removed all those sites and redirects too (couple of weeks ago) but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. There's no black hat SEO done on the site so very odd to have this happen. I'm rather out of ideas what it could be that has impacted things so suddenly and that we couldn't get it recovered from. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrisbaneSEOWorks0 -
Which one is highest Traffic Generation forum ?
Hello guys, can any one please suggest me Good highest Traffic Generation forum For Business. as there are many but i need best sites Which could generate Good traffic,As i am new to Forum posting. any export can help please. Thank you in advance, Falguni
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | innovativeecomindia0 -
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH0 -
AdWare is Sending Me Traffic - Why?
I have a client who is receiving a good bit of traffic from a source that I believe to be AdWare, which is obviously bad. I didn't commission anyone to do this, so I'm at a loss as to where it originated, but it sends me many unique users per day - of course, the bounce rate is 80%, and the average time on the site is 8 seconds. If I were to change site servers, would that A) stop the AdWare traffic, and B) change my rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | stubenbordt0 -
Is it possible that since the Google Farmer's Update, that people practicing Google Bowling can negatively affect your site?
We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dahnyogaworks0