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 error from Google
Moz couldn't explain this properly and I don't understand how to fix it. Google emailed this morning saying "Alternate page with proper canonical tag." Moz also kinda complains about the main URL and the main URL/index.html being duplicate. Of course they are. The main URL doesn't work without the index.html page. What am I missing? How can I fix this to eliminate this duplicate problem which to me isn't a problem?
Technical SEO | | RVForce0 -
Old domain to new domain
Hi, A website on server A is no longer required. The owner has redirected some URLS of this website (via plugin) to his new website on server B -but not all URLS. So when I use COMMAND site:website A , I see a mixture of redirected URLS and not redirected URLS.Therefore two websites are still being indexed in some form and causing duplication. However, weirdly when I crawl with Screaming Frog I only see one URL which is 301 redirected to the new website. I would have thought I'd see lots of URLs which hadn't been redirected. How come it is different to using the site:command? Anyway, how do I move to the new website completely without the old one being indexed anymore. I thought I knew this but have read so many blogs I've confused myself! Should I: Redirect all URLS via the HTACESS file on old website on server A? There are lots of pages indexed so a lot of URLs. What if I miss some? or Point the old domain via DNS to server B and do the redirects in website B HTaccess file? This seems more sensible but does this method still retain the website rankings? Thanks for any help
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Old Redirected Domain is replacing my current domain on SERPs
Hello everyone, All of a sudden a 2 year old redirected domain is replacing my current domain for 2 weeks now, my site is apitus.com and my old domain is aptitus.pe (the redirect is still working), however this only happens on my country google results (google.com.pe), if you check my site on google.com, everything looks ok even with a sitelink, which I no longer have on my country search results. Back to the issue, the first thing I thought was go to Search Console and take it out from the index, so I asked for access by uploading a file but since everything on that old site redirects to my current site I can't make such action. While still waiting for such access, is there anything else I could do?. Thanks in advance. PD: I'm adding the images of my SERPs CmzN8kY G3zZwwj
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
301 - Specific Domain
In Google our main website page url is <cite class="_Rm">www.wheelchairparts.com</cite> it has 25 root domain links & PA 34. When you go to our website from there, the homepage url is http://www.wheelchairparts.com/store/pc/home.asp it only has 3 root domain links & PA 27. Do I need to add a 301 Redirect here? What kind of redirect is on it now? Thanks, - Mike Bean
Technical SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
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 | | ztalk1120 -
Regarding Canonical Url
We have a e-commerce website. Our own homegrown:-) We recently visited Google Webmaster tools and could see that Google mention we have double Meta tags for some main and subcategories. Each Product Category on our site have a subcategory/ Sub url - "Bestseller", "On Sale", "just arrived". The sub url is not a really a real category and we can therefore not make totally unique description and title for does urls. domain.com/category domain.com/category/bestseller
Technical SEO | | areygie
domain.com/category/on-sale
domain.com/category/just-arrived We are thinking about 2 solutions. 1. Canonical Url on subcategory pointing to main category.
2. Or add a word bestseller, on sale or just arrived in front of the meta title/description. We can do this from code. I personally opt for option 1. But I am little unsure what is the best way to go. Thanks in advance for your advice0 -
Rel-canonical tag
Hi, I'm having some confusion with the rel-canonical tag. A few months ago we implemented the rel-canonical tag because we had many errors specifically duplicate page content come upon the SEOmoz web app (mostly because we use tracking code). I had asked what to do about this and was advised by the SEOmoz web app to implement the rel-canonical tag. However, when I'm working on the Keyword Optimizer Tool, it always checks off that I'm using the rel-canonical tag improperly, and then when I go into our sites' CMS for that page and uncheck "Use Canonical URL", the keyword optimizer tool up's my grade for that correction/that I've made an improvement. So my question is if the page I'm working on is the one I want search engines to find, should I not be using the Canonical URL tag? Should the Canonical URL tag only be used on URL's with the tracking code?
Technical SEO | | aircyclemegan0