Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Cross Canonicalization for domains with same menu
-
I have a client who took 3 pages from its main website and made them into their own domains. So that now, for example,
www.mainsite.com/page
redirects to
www.page.comThis is so users can be given access to the content on that specific page with ease.
Now, www.page.com has the same menu items as www.mainsite.com, so that users who select the menu items on www.page.com will be circled back to the main site.But this means that there are now different URLs for these pages.
ie:
On www.mainsite.com there is: www.mainsite.com/menu-item
(the content resides here)And on www.page.com there is: www.page.com/menu-item
(Which is basically "scaffolding" to support the page and a means to get around, so to speak.This is to make any and all pages accessible at either domain. ) I have only seen this type of URL on the Moz campaign crawl. In the real world, when a user selects a menu item from the www.page.com, it will circle back to www.mainsite.com/menu-itemSEO-wise, should I use cross-canonicalization to point www.page.com/menu-item to www.mainsite.com/menu-item? Or would this be splitting hairs since these are only seen on the Moz crawl?
-
@Shrine-SEO-Gal said in Cross Canonicalization for domains with same menu:
I have a client who took 3 pages from its main website and made them into their own domains. So that now, for example,
www.mainsite.com/page
redirects to
www.page.com
This is so users can be given access to the content on that specific page with ease.
Now, www.page.com has the same menu items as www.mainsite.com, so that users who select the menu items on www.page.com will be circled back to the main site.
But this means that there are now different URLs for these pages.
ie:
On www.mainsite.com there is: www.mainsite.com/menu-item
(the content resides here)
And on www.page.com there is: www.page.com/menu-item
(Which is basically "scaffolding" to support the page and a means to get around, so to speak.This is to make any and all pages accessible at either domain. ) I have only seen this type of URL on the Moz campaign crawl. In the real world, when a user selects a menu item from the www.page.com, it will circle back to www.mainsite.com/menu-item
SEO-wise, should I use cross-canonicalization to point www.page.com/menu-item to www.mainsite.com/menu-item? Or would this be splitting hairs since these are only seen on the Moz crawl?For SEO, using cross-canonical tags would help consolidate authority and avoid potential duplication issues, even though the structure is primarily for navigation and redirecting users to the main site. Adding canonicals from
www.page.com/menu-item
towww.mainsite.com/menu-item
signals to search engines that the main version resides on the main site, which is helpful in the long term.Since these URLs show up only in Moz crawls, this isn’t an urgent issue, but canonicalization helps clarify the content's primary source if search engines eventually pick up on
www.page.com/menu-item
. You might also want to set up redirects on these scaffold URLs if they don’t need to be indexed separately, which can further ensure consistency.
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
-
Redirect multiple domains to 1 domain or not?
Hi there, I have client who has multiple domains that already have some PA and DA. Problem is that most websites have the same content and rank better on different keywords.
Technical SEO | | Leaf-a-mark
I want to redirect all the websites to 1 domain because it’s easier to manage and it removes any duplicate content. Question is if I redirect domain x to domain y do the rankings of domain x increase on domain y? Or is it better to keep domain x separately to generate more referral traffic to domain y? Thanks in advance! Cheers0 -
Clients domain expired - rankings lost - repurchased domain - what next?
Its only been 10 days and i have repurchased the domain name/ renewed. The who is info, website and contact information is all still the same. However we have lost all rankings and i am hoping that our top rankings come back. Does anyone have experience with such a crappy situation?
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Localized domains and duplicate content
Hey guys, In my company we are launching a new website and there's an issue it's been bothering me for a while. I'm sure you guys can help me out. I already have a website, let's say ABC.com I'm preparing a localized version of that website for the uk so we'll launch ABC.co.uk Basically the websites are going to be exactly the same with the difference of the homepage. They have a slightly different proposition. Using GeoIP I will redirect the UK traffic to ABC.co.uk and the rest of the traffic will still visit .com website. May google penalize this? The site itself it will be almost the same but the homepage. This may count as duplicate content even if I'm geo-targeting different regions so they will never overlap. Thanks in advance for you advice
Technical SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
.ca and. com domains
Hello, currently the main site im working on is a .com, but have the .ca version purchased from register.com. should i have this setup to redirect to the .com site. will google see these as dup content. We have the .ca for our canadian customers but both sites are identical. Thank you
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Beating a keyword Domain
Has anyone here managed to beat a keyword/exact match domain to top spot? I am currently second and wondering if it is worth the time and effort to knock it off the top spot. How hard is it to get these very annoyingly favoured domains off 1st? Any help and advice much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Mobile Domain Setup
Hi, If I want to serve a subset of pages on my mobile set from my desktop site or the content is significantly different, i.e. it is not one to one or pages are a summarised version of the desktop, should I use m.site.com or is it still better to use site.com? Many thanks any help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MarkChambers0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0 -
How to Redirect only specific pages to new domain
My HTACCESS FILE IS AS FOLLOWS: rewriteengine on
Technical SEO | | askthetrainer
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$
rewriterule ^mydomain/(.*)$ "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [R=301,L] #4d864805b49b5 I want to move ONLY specific pages from this domain to a new domain How do I edit my HTACCESS (which redirects http:// to www.) to move specific pages from old domain (which I have to delete) to new domain.... I.e. http://mydomaon.com/move.html needs to move to http://mynewdomain.com/move.html Where i can delete the original domains0