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!
-
Thanks Mike!
In your opinion, big 301 redirects would be totally better ?
-
Okay, so no 301s.... well then, assuming all of those duplicate sites have been live for a while and crawled by the spiders, you might be better served with canonical tags.
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
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | murraycustomhomescom0 -
Duplicate content across different domains
Hi Guys, Looking for some advice regarding duplicate content across different domains. I have reviewed some previous Q&A on this topic e.g. https://moz.com/community/q/two-different-domains-exact-same-content but just want to confirm if I'm missing anything. Basically, we have a client which has 1 site (call this site A) which has solids rankings. They have decided to build a new site (site B), which contains 50% duplicate pages and content from site A. Our recommendation to them was to make the content on site B as unique as possible but they want to launch asap, so not enough time. They will eventually transfer over to unique content on the website but in the short-term, it will be duplicate content. John Mueller from Google has said several times that there is no duplicate content penalty. So assuming this is correct site A should be fine, no ranking losses. Any disagree with this? Assuming we don't want to leave this to chance or assume John Mueller is correct would the next best thing to do is setup rel canonical tags between site A and site B on the pages with duplicate content? Then once we have unique content ready, execute that content on the site and remove the canonical tags. Any suggestions or advice would be very much appreciated! Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Rebranding/Changing the name of an established domain in order to target a bigger market?
So let's say I have a site called "ToyotaParts.com" that has good SEO metrics and is ranking highly for keywords like "toyota tires", "toyota battery", etc.... What if I decide that I wanna target other cars as well with my site and keywords like "mazda tires", yet still want to take advantage of my domain's existing authority... Can I do something like get a new domain like "carparts.com" and redirect the old domain to it and then continue to create new pages that would target new keywords, or would I risk losing my current domain's authority or running into other seo issues? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjonson0 -
Should sub domains to organise content and directories?
I'm working on a site that has directories for service providers and content about those services. My idea is to organise the services into groups, e.g. Web, Graphic, Software Development since they are different topics. Each sub domain (hub) has it's own sales pages, directory of services providers and blog content. E.g. the web hub has web.servicecrowd.com.au (hub home) web.servicecrowd.com.au/blog (hub blog) http://web.servicecrowd.com.au/dir/p (hub directory) Is this overkill or will it help in the long run when there are hundreds of services like dog grooming and DJing? Seems better to have separate sub domains and unique blogs for groups of services and content topics.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ServiceCrowd_AU0 -
Meta No INDEX and Robots - Optimizing Crawl Budget
Hi, Sometime ago, a few thousand pages got into Google's index - they were "product pop up" pages, exact duplicates of the actual product page but a "quick view". So I deleted them via GWT and also put in a Meta No Index on these pop up overlays to stop them being indexed and causing dupe content issues. They are no longer within the index as far as I can see, i do a site:www.mydomain.com/ajax and nothing appears - So can I block these off now with robots.txt to optimize my crawl budget? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
What are recommended best practices for hosting native advertising sponsored content on domains for large publishers?
On top of clear on-page sponsored content copy would you add meta robots to noindex native advertising? Google recently came out against this type of content in GNews, is there a similar directive for the main index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hankazarian0 -
Reinforcing Rel Canonical? (Fixing Duplicate Content)
Hi Mozzers, We're having trouble with duplicate content between two sites, so we're looking to add some oomph to the rel canonical link elements we put on one of our sites pointing towards the other to help speed up the process and give Google a bigger hint. Would adding a hyperlink on the "copying" website pointing towards the "original" website speed this process up? Would we get in trouble if added about 80,000 links (1 on each product page) with a link to the matching product on the other site? For example, we could use text like "Buy XY product on Other Brand Name and receive 10% off!"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Should we block urls like this - domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=ascℴ=price&price=1 within the robots.txt?
I've recently added a campaign within the SEOmoz interface and received an alarming number of errors ~9,000 on our eCommerce website. This site was built in Magento, and we are using search friendly url's however most of our errors were duplicate content / titles due to url's like: domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=1 and domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=4. Is this hurting us in the search engines? Is rogerbot too good? What can we do to cut off bots after the ".html?" ? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280