Can you canonical from one domain page to a different domain page
-
We are a boating site and have our main site with all it's products. We have an engine section within our main site. But we also have an outside domain, specific to a certain manufacturer of engines. So we want our customers to still find the engine information for this manufacturer within our main site, as well as find the manufacturer targeted engine site in the SERPS.
My question is this: Can I canonical those pages within our main site to pages on the outside domain? Or does are canonicals to be used only within the same domain?
Thanks,
-
Well - he's done more than a few so it's easy for one to go MIA. Like a Cutts video.
-
Dave:
Thanks again. I just watched Rand's whiteboard Friday on this, and it gave me some additional ideas on some old sites that we have, to utilize the value of those pages by canonicalizing those pages to our main website.
I usually watch a lot of Rand's whiteboards, but must have missed this one.
Thanks!
-
Craig:
Thanks for your input. We are trying to determine how best to maintain the traffic and value on our outside engine site, but still give our boaters on the main page the info they are looking for without clicking away to another (manufacturer) page. Having duplicate pages makes sense to us, but making sure that Google gives the manufacturer page the value. So a canonical seems logical for what we are trying to accomplish. We have hundred's of thousands of pages on our main site, so we are not concerned of losing value there. However, we do want to keep and build the value of our manufacturer pages. That is where we want our traffic to go when they are looking for that manufacturer-specific product.
Thanks again for your input!
-
Thank you for your reply. I'll check Rand's video. I'm assuming it is one of his white board Friday discussions? In the meantime I did find Google's take on it. It was on their Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Thanks again for responding!
-
While you can use a cross-domain canonical from your main site to the engine's site, are you sure that you should?
When you canonical the page, you're telling Google "Hey, the page you're on is functionally the same as this other page here. That other page should be the one that gets the credit for this content."
If your primary goal is to have your main page ranking, then you don't want to be telling Google to take away it's credit for your more narrowly focused engine site.
What I would rather do is work to make each of those pages unique - perhaps the main boating site would contain the broader information on the engines as well as reviews/ratings from current customers but then link to the engine-specific site within that page to get to thinks like additional manufacturer specs, repair guides, etc.
That way you are focusing each page better for the target customer and sharing some link equity between the two pages, rather than directing it all at the more narrow domain.
-
In 2011 Google extended the canonical tag to support cross-domain. Rand made a video of it ...
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
-
Can you use the canonical tag and rel=next and rel=prev on category pages.
We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are. Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
How many Anchor text i can make on One page.
I would like to have clear answer in numbers i.e. 1, 2, 3, or 4 etc. of how many Anchor text i can make on One page.????
On-Page Optimization | | 1akal0 -
Why don't all my pages have On Page Optimization Reports
Apologies if this question has been asked a million times, but I can't find it. I have 35 pages, yet only 5 of them have generated On Page Optimization Reports. I know I can create them manually, but wondered if I've done something incorrectly? Iain.
On-Page Optimization | | iainmoran0 -
E-commerce store having same content different language pages
Hello, I have an e-commerce store operating on PrestaShop. I have four languages Fr, De, En and Nl. The url for each page changes like Example.com/en/product1 Example.com/fr/Product1 Example.com/de/product1 Example.com/nl/Product1 All these pages have same content about product1 but translated in respective language. Is it considered as duplicate content? Should I suppose to write different content for each page?
On-Page Optimization | | MozAddict0 -
Home page keyword effecting internal page ranking
Hello, My client has a second keyword for the home page that is competitive. The home page is not being ranked for this keyword. Instead, an internal category page is ranking. This internal category page is more relevant than the home page - it shows the categories for the actual products that this term refers to. But everyone around us in Google's page results has far more backlinks than the internal page, and we're all heavily optimized for this term. My question is, is it safe to pull the second term off of the home page or is this internal page strong because it is somehow being strengthened by the home page optimization?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Dupelicate content home page and custom page question
I am working on a website that got hit by the penguin update. Didn't get hit terribly bad, but dropped from number one to number 9. As I'm going through the pages, the theme and content is a mess. To give an example, say the site is about custom colored marbles. The main page content covers custom colored marbles, custom promotional marbles, custom glass marbles, etc. Custom colored marbles is mentioned and covered on all pages, which I am going back and trying to make each page theme specific. There is also a custom page, so I am at a cross roads on how best to employ the focus of the custom page and the home page. I am thinking the home page should emphasize colored marbles, and the custom page should emphasize custom colored marbles. My fear is that making such a drastic change will bounce the site completely off front page and that it will take time for the custom page to come up in rankings. AS it stands now I am confused as to how it even ranks on first page as there's two pages with custom colored marbles emphasis. Id like to clean this up as much as possible so there are no big hits with future google updates, but I don't want the site to drop off either as that would be hard to explain to the owner. Yeah, we are cleaning up your site and making it google compliant and in so doing you no longer rank on first page. That won't put food on the table. Thanks for any advise on this.
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
301 redirects from several sub-pages to one sub-page
Hi! I have 14 sub-pages i deleted earlier today. But ofcourse Google can still find them, and gives everyone that gives them a go a 404 error. I have come to the understading that this wil hurt the rest of my site, at least as long as Google have them indexed. These sub-pages lies in 3 different folders, and i want to redirect them to a sub-page in a folder number 4. I have already an htaccess file, but i just simply cant get it to work! It is the same file as i use for redirecting trafic from mydomain.no to www.mydomain.no, and i have tried every kind of variation i can think of with the sub-pages. Has anyone perhaps had the same problem before, or for any other reason has the solution, and can help me with how to compose the htaccess file? 🙂 You have to excuse me if i'm using the wrong terms, missing something i should have seen under water while wearing a blindfold, or i am misspelling anything. I am neither very experienced with anything surrounding seo or anything else that has with internet to do, nor am i from an englishspeaking country. Hope someone here can light up my path 🙂 Thats at least something you can say in norwegian...
On-Page Optimization | | MarieA1 -
Why is On-Page showing canonical wrong?
I'm trying to use the On-Page report card and it's saying that my rel=canonical is wrong, I've looked and I can't see anything wrong with it, am I missing something? The url is www.harrisonlighting.co.uk/childrens-lights.html
On-Page Optimization | | HarrisonLighting0