Same content on other domain owned by de company. Canonical is not working
-
Hi!
I am analyzing a website right now. It's a school, let's name it NEWSCHOOL. This school is owned by other school, let's name it, BIGSCHOOL
NEWSCHOOL is specialized in tourism degrees, and the BIGSCHOOL is a bigger and older one with a lot of different degrees.
What happens is that NEWSCHOOL has a course, let's name it TOURISM DEGREE.
BIGSCHOOL has that course too, with the same content, trying to help to promote the content, because this school is older, well known and has a consolidated brand internationally.BIGSCHOOL, has placed a canonical tag, telling Google that content comes from NEWSCHOOL.
What is happening is that the result of newschool is beeing omited by google. The first result is the BIGSCHOOL content, and then a lot of training portals, where the degree content is too to increase its visibility.
So, I would like to know, how can we do to say google that the content that it should show is the one of NEWSCHOOL and not the one in BIGSCHOOL. It's pretty clear that Google knows that those portals are closed related, because it is omitting the NEWSCHOOL results.
I know that we can send a link from the content area from one portal to the other in the content we want. But... would it solve the problem... and y we have to repeat that for each degree, woudn't it be a little dangerous?
Would like to know your points of view!
Thanks!
-
Thanks Everett, I agree that the best would be creating diferent content, but It is a little difficult, cause it is the explanation of the contents and programming of one course.
Thank you for your answer, and I will recomend publishing the content first in NEWSCHOOL and sending to the index before sending that content to other pages or portals!
-
The cross-domain rel canonical tag is a "hint" to Google, not a "directive". They can and do ignore it when other signals overwhelmingly indicate that a different page is the canonical one.
My advice would be to write new content for NEWSCHOOL.
If you can't do that, consider all of the different signals that Google can use besides the rel canonical tag:
- Initial publish date of the content
- Initial indexation date
- External links pointing to the content
- Internal links pointing to the content
- Domain authority (including domain-wide links)
- Age of the domain
- How the two pages are linking to each other
Last but not least you could noindex the BIGSCHOOL version, but not the NEWSCHOOL version and leave your cross-domain rel canonical tag up.
Again, it would be best to have unique content on both sites.
-
On my sites, if I have rel=caononical on Page A, referring to Page B (on another domain) as the source of the content, I do have a followed link from Page A to Page B. That link is in a sentence that says that the content was originally published on Page B on the other domain. I do not know if this is the way that Google would have done this, but this is what I have done and I can say that the results have been excellent. Page B does very well in the SERPs. (Page A is on a much more powerful website.)
-
Hi!
So, your point is to wait for that to happen, isn't it? What do you think about sending a link from the BIGSCHOOL course page to the NEWSCHOOL course page? I mean, canonical + link
Thank you!
-
Thanks Rebecca! I would probably go that way!
-
Thanks Umar!
What do you mean with ...
"I reckon your "New School" is not offering lots of degree courses so yes you can get the link from "Big School's" content but make sure, you are linking in a proper and natural way"
I woudn't be natural... cause both have the same owner...
-
I suggest lots of patience here. One of the goals of the rel=canonical is to have the ranking value of the BigSchool page passed to the new domain. If you simply do rel=canonical that will happen. If you use noindex, nofollow, robots, meta robots or anything else then you will take, by total chance, whatever google decides to give you.
I would be willing to sit for months on this if you are going to rel=canonical route.
-
You could noindex, follow the BIGSCHOOL tourism degree page.
-
I agree with Umar that BIGSCHOOL's overall authority is probably getting in the way. Is there any way to get a dofollow link from their course page to yours to help reinforce the linkage? Funneling a little extra juice your way certainly wouldn't hurt and it makes sense contextually.
-
It can take google a really long time to honor some rel=canonical. I have used some and it has taken many months for all of them to be honored.
-
Hey,
It seems that Google is giving respect to "Big School" because of it's overall authority. If you like to continue this approach, you might need to work on the overall authority of "New School" to get things straight.
Frankly speaking, I wouldn't go with this strategy as there are lots of other ways to leverage your new site from the old one. For instance, you may place the attractive banners at the "Tourism" page that point to your new school and stuff like that.
I reckon your "New School" is not offering lots of degree courses so yes you can get the link from "Big School's" content but make sure, you are linking in a proper and natural way.
For more details about canonical tags FAQs, please refer to this brilliant resource from Dr.Pete,
https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsHope this helps!
Thanks,
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
-
Move to new domain using Canonical Tag
At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site). Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead. Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | india-morocco0 -
Geo-Targeted Sub-Domains & Duplicate Content/Canonical
For background the sub domain structure here is inherited and commited to due to tech restrictions with some of our platforms. The brand I work with is splitting out their global site into regional sub sites (not too relevant but this is in order to display seasonal product in different hemispheres and to link to stores specific to the region). All sub-domains except EU will be geo-targeted to their relevant country. Regions and sub domains for reference: AU - Australia CA - Canada CH - Switzeraland EU - All Euro zone countries NZ - New Zealand US - United States This will be done with Wordpress multisite. The set up allows to publish content on one 'master' sub site and then decide which other sub sites to 'broadcast' to. Some content is specific to a sub-domain/region so no issue with duplicate and can set the sub-site version as canonical. However some content will appear on all sub-domains. au.example.com/awesome-content/ nz.example.com/awesome-content/ Now first question is since these domains are geo-targeted should I just have them all canonical to the version on that sub-domain? eg Or should I still signal the duplicate content with one canonical version? Essentially the top level example.com exists as a site only for publishing purposes - if a user lands on the top level example.com/awesome-content/ they are given a pop up to select region and redirected to the relevant sub-domain version. So I'm also unsure whether I want that content indexed at all?? I could make the top level example.com versions of all content be the canonical that all others point to eg. and rely on geo-targeting to have the right links show in the right search locations. I hope that's kind of clear?? Obviously I find it confusing and therefore hard to relay! Any feedback at all gratefully received. Cheers, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveHoney0 -
Strange Cross Domain Canonical Issue...
We have 2 identical ecommerce sites. Using 301 is not an option since both are major brands. We've been testing cross domain canonicals for about 2 dozen products, which were pretty successful. Our rankings generally increased. Then things got weird. For the most part, canonicaled pages appeared to have passed link juice since the rankings significantly improved on the other site. The clean URLs (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm) disappeared from the rankings, as they are supposed to, but some were replaced by urls with parameters that Google had indexed (apparently duplicate content). ex: (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm?clicksource?3diaftv). The parametered URLs have the correct canonical tags. In order to try and remove these from Google's index, we: 1. Had the pages fetched in GWT assuming that Google hadn't detected the canonical tage. 2. After we discovered a few hundred of these pages indexed on both sites, we built sitemaps of the offending pages and had the sitemaps fetched. If anyone has any other ideas, please share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Duplicate Content: Is a product feed/page rolled out across subdomains deemed duplicate content?
A company has a TLD (top-level-domain) which every single product: company.com/product/name.html The company also has subdomains (tailored to a range of products) which lists a choosen selection of the products from the TLD - sort of like a feed: subdomain.company.com/product/name.html The content on the TLD & subdomain product page are exactly the same and cannot be changed - CSS and HTML is slightly differant but the content (text and images) is exactly the same! My concern (and rightly so) is that Google will deem this to be duplicate content, therfore I'm going to have to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of all subdomain pages, pointing to the original product page on the TLD. Does this sound like the correct thing to do? Or is there a better solution? Moving on, not only are products fed onto subdomain, there are a handfull of other domains which list the products - again, the content (text and images) is exactly the same: other.com/product/name.html Would I be best placed to add a rel cannonical tag into the header of the product pages on other domains, pointing to the original product page on the actual TLD? Does rel cannonical work across domains? Would the product pages with a rel cannonical tag in the header still rank? Let me know if there is a better solution all-round!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Duplicate Content... Really?
Hi all, My site is www.actronics.eu Moz reports virtually every product page as duplicate content, flagged as HIGH PRIORITY!. I know why. Moz classes a page as duplicate if >95% content/code similar. There's very little I can do about this as although our products are different, the content is very similar, albeit a few part numbers and vehicle make/model. Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowoody
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/audi-a4-8d-b5-1994-2000-abs-ecu-en/bosch-5-3
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/bmw-3-series-e36-1990-1998-abs-ecu-en/ate-34-51 Now, multiply this by ~2,000 products X 7 different languages and you'll see we have a big dupe content issue (according to Moz's Crawl Diagnostics report). I say "according to Moz..." as I do not know if this is actually an issue for Google? 90% of our products pages rank, albeit some much better than others? So what is the solution? We're not trying to deceive Google in any way so it would seem unfair to be hit with a dupe content penalty, this is a legit dilemma where our product differ by as little as a part number. One ugly solution would be to remove header / sidebar / footer on our product pages as I've demonstrated here - http://woodberry.me.uk/test-page2-minimal-v2.html since this removes A LOT of page bloat (code) and would bring the page difference down to 80% duplicate.
(This is the tool I'm using for checking http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php) Other "prettier" solutions would greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks,
Woody 🙂1 -
Multiply domains and duplicate content confusion
I've just found out that a client has multiple domains which are being indexed by google and so leading me to worry that they will be penalised for duplicate content. Wondered if anyone could confirm a) are we likely to be penalised? and b) what should we do about it? (i'm thinking just 301 redirect each domain to the main www.clientdomain.com...?). Actual domain = www.clientdomain.com But these also exist: www.hostmastr.clientdomain.com www.pop.clientdomain.com www.subscribers.clientdomain.com www.www2.clientdomain.com www.wwwww.clientdomain.com ps I have NO idea how/why all these domains exist I really appreciate any expertise on this issue, many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bisibee10 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
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