Cross-Domain Canonical and duplicate content
-
Hi Mozfans!
I'm working on seo for one of my new clients and it's a job site (i call the site: Site A).
The thing is that the client has about 3 sites with the same Jobs on it.I'm pointing a duplicate content problem, only the thing is the jobs on the other sites must stay there. So the client doesn't want to remove them. There is a other (non ranking) reason why.
Can i solve the duplicate content problem with a cross-domain canonical?
The client wants to rank well with the site i'm working on (Site A).Thanks!
Rand did a whiteboard friday about Cross-Domain Canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday -
Every document I have seen all agrees that canonical tags are followed when the tag is used appropriately.
The tag could be misused either intentionally or unintentionally in which case it would not be honored. The tag is meant to connect pages which offer identical information, very similar information, or the same information presented in a different format such as a modified sort order, or a print version. I have never seen nor even heard of an instance where a properly used canonical tag was not respected by Google or Bing.
-
Thanks Ryan, I didn't noticed that about the reply sequencing, and you're right, I read them in the wrong order. It makes much more sense now.
By "some" support, I meant that even Google via Matt Cutts says that they don't take cross domain canonical as "a directive" but rather a "hint" (and even that assumes Google agrees with you, that your pages are duplicates).
So the magic question is how how much authority do Bing and Google give the rel="canonical" and is it similar between the two engines?
-
One aspect of the SEOmoz Q&A structure I dislike is the ordering of responses. Rather then maintaining a timeline order, the responses are re-ordered based on other factors such as "thumbs-up" and staff endorsements. I understand the concept that replies which are liked more are probably more helpful and should be seen first, but it causes confusion such as in this case.
Dr. Pete's response on the Bing cross-canonical topic appears first, but it was offered second-to-last chronologically speaking. We originally agreed there was not evidence indicating Bing supported the cross-canonical tag, then he located such evidence and therefore we agree Bing does support the tag.
The statement Dr. Pete shared was that "Bing does support cross-domain canonical". There was no limiting factor. I mention this because you said they offered "some" support and I am not sure why you used that qualifier.
-
Ryan, at the end o the thread you linked to, it seems like both Dr. Pete and yourself, agreed that there wasn't much evidence of bing support. Have you learned something that changed your mind?
I know a rep from Bing told Dr. Pete there was "some" support, but what does that mean? i.e. Exactly Identical sites pass a little juice/authority, or similar sites pass **a lot **juice/authority?
Take a product that has different brands in different parts of the country. Hellmanns's and Best Foods for example. They have two sites which are the same except for logos. Here is a recipe from each site.
http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1
http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1
The sites are nearly identical except for logo's/product names.
For the (very) long tail keyword "Mayonnaise Bobby Flay Waldorf salad wrap" Best Foods ranks #5 and Hellmann's ranks #11.
I doubt they have a SEO looking very close at the sites, because in addition to their duplicate content problem, neither pages has a meta description.
If the Hellmanns page had a
[http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1](http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1)"/>
I'd expect to see the Best Foods page move up and Hellmanns move down in Google. But would Bing appears to not like the duplicate pages as much, currently the Best Food version ranks #12 and the Hellmann doesn't rank at all. My own (imperfect tests) lead me to believe that adding the rel="canonical" would help in google but not bing.
Obviously, the site owner would probably like one of those two pages to rank very high for the unbranded keyword, but they would want both pages to rank well if I added a branded term. My experience with cross-domain canonical in Google lead me to believe that even the non-canonical version would rank for branded keywords in Google, but what would Bing do?
I'd be very cautious about relying on the cross-domain canonical in Bing until I see some PUBIC announcement that it's supported. ```
-
I was bit confused when i read that. You put my mind to rest !
-
My apologies Atul. I am not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. Please disregard.
-
Thanks Ryan!
So it will be a Canonical tag
-
I would advise NOT using the robots.txt file if at all possible. In general, the robots.txt file is a means of absolute last resort. The main reason I use the robots.txt file is because I am working with a CMS or shopping cart that does not have the SEO flexibility to noindex pages. Otherwise, the best robots.txt file is a blank one.
When you block a page in robots.txt, you are not only preventing content from being indexed, but you are blocking the natural flow of page rank throughout your site. The link juice which flows to the blocked page dies on the page as crawlers cannot access it.
-
That is correct. If you choose to read the information directly from Google it can be found here:
-
Thanks!
It's for a site in the Netherlands and google is about 98% of the market. Bing is comming up so a thing to check.
No-roboting is a way to do it i didn't think about! thanks for that. I will check with the client.
-
Thanks Ryan!
So link is like:
On the site a i will use the canonical to point everything to site A.
-
You mean rel=author on site A ? How does it help ? Where should rel=author points to ?
-
According to Dr. Pete Bing does support cross-domain canonical.
If you disagreed I would first recommend using rel=author to establish "Site A" was the source of the article.
-
A cross-domain canonical will help with Google. (make sure the pages truely are duplicate or very close), however, I haven't found any confirmation yet that Bing supports Cross Domain Canonical.
If the other sites don't need to rank at all, you could also consider no-roboting the job pages on the other sites, so that your only Site A's job listings get indexed.
-
Yes. A cross-domain canonical would solve the duplicate content issue and focus on the main site's ranking.
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
-
Copied Content - Define Canonical
Hello, The Story I am working on a news organization. Our website is the https://www.neakriti.gr My question regards copied content with source references. Sometimes a small portion of our content is based on some third article that is posted on some site (that is about 1% of our content). We always put "source" reference if that is the case. This is inevitable as "news" is something that sometimes has sources on other news sites, especially if there is something you cannot verify or don't have immediate sources, and therefore you need to state that "according to this source, something has happened". Here is one article of ours that has a source from another site: https://www.neakriti.gr/article/ellada-nea/1503363/nekros-vrethike-o-agnooumenos-arhimandritis-stin-lakonia/ if you open the above article you will see we have a link to the equivalent article of the original source site http://lakonikos.gr/epikairothta/item/133664-nekros-entopistike-o-arximandritis-p-andreas-bolovinos-synexis-enimerosi Now here is my question. I have read in other MOZ forum articles that a "canonical" approach solves this issue... How can we be legit when it comes to duplicate content in the eyes of search engines? Should we use some kind of canonical link to the source site? Should the "canonical" be inside the link in some way? Should it be on our section? Our site has AMP equivalent pages (if you add the /amp keyword at the end of the article URL). Our AMP pages have canonical to our original article. So if we have a "canonical" approach how would the AMP be effected as well? Also by applying a possible canonical solution to the source URL, does that "canonical" effect our article as not being shown in search results, thus passing all indexing to the canonical site? (I know that canonical indicates what URL is to be indexed). Additionally, does such a canonical indication make us legit in such a case in the eyes of search engines? (i.e. it eliminates any possible article duplication for original content in the eyes of search engines?). Or simply put, having a simple link to the original article (as we have it now) is enough for the search engines to understand that we have reference to original article URL? How would we approach this problem in our site based on its current structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisanif0 -
Internal Duplicate Content Question...
We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson091 -
Category Pages For Distributing Authority But Not Creating Duplicate Content
I read this interesting moz guide: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt, which I think answered my question but I just want to make sure. I take it to mean that if I have category pages with nothing but duplicate content (lists of other pages (h1 title/on-page description and links to same) and that I still want the category pages to distribute their link authority to the individual pages, then I should leave the category pages in the site map and meta noindex them, rather than robots.txt them. Is that correct? Again, don't want the category pages to index or have a duplicate content issue, but do want the category pages to be crawled enough to distribute their link authority to individual pages. Given the scope of the site (thousands of pages and hundreds of categories), I just want to make sure I have that right. Up until my recent efforts on this, some of the category pages have been robot.txt'd out and still in the site map, while others (with different url structure) have been in the sitemap, but not robots.txt'd out. Thanks! Best.. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Duplicate page content errors stemming from CMS
Hello! We've recently relaunched (and completely restructured) our website. All looks well except for some duplicate content issues. Our internal CMS (custom) adds a /content/ to each page. Our development team has also set-up URLs to work without /content/. Is there a way I can tell Google that these are the same pages. I looked into the parameters tool, but that seemed more in-line with ecommerce and the like. Am I missing anything else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Duplicate content resulting from js redirect?
I recently created a cname (e.g. m.client-site .com) and added some js (supplied by mobile site vendor to the head which is designed to detect if the user agent is a mobi device or not. This is part of the js: var CurrentUrl = location.href var noredirect = document.location.search; if (noredirect.indexOf("no_redirect=true") < 0){ if ((navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPhone|iPod|BlackBerry|Android.*Mobile|webOS|Window Now... Webmaster Tools is indicating 2 url versions for each page on the site - for example: 1.) /content-page.html 2.) /content-page.html?no_redirect=true and resulting in duplicate page titles and meta descriptions. I am not quite adept enough at either js or htaccess to really grasp what's going on here... so an explanation of why this is occurring and how to deal with it would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Advice needed on how to handle alleged duplicate content and titles
Hi I wonder if anyone can advise on something that's got me scratching my head. The following are examples of urls which are deemed to have duplicate content and title tags. This causes around 8000 errors, which (for the most part) are valid urls because they provide different views on market data. e.g. #1 is the summary, while #2 is 'Holdings and Sector weightings'. #3 is odd because it's crawling the anchored link. I didn't think hashes were crawled? I'd like some advice on how best to handle these, because, really they're just queries against a master url and I'd like to remove the noise around duplicate errors so that I can focus on some other true duplicate url issues we have. Here's some example urls on the same page which are deemed as duplicates. 1) http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Holdings-and-sectors-weighting?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE&widgets=1 What's the best way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchPM0 -
Rel canonical and duplicate subdomains
Hi, I'm working with a site that has multiple sub domains of entirely duplicate content. So, the production level site that visitors see is (for made-up illustrative example): 123abc456.edu Then, there are sub domains which are used by different developers to work on their own changes to the production site, before those changes are pushed to production: Larry.123abc456.edu Moe.123abc456.edu Curly.123abc456.edu Google ends up indexing these duplicate sub domains, which is of course not good. If we add a canonical tag to the head section of the production page (and therefor all of the duplicate sub domains) will that cause some kind of problem... having a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself? Is it okay to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to that same page? To complete the example... In this example, where our production page is 123abc456.edu, our canonical tag on all pages (this page and therefor the duplicate subdomains) would be: Is that going to be okay and fix this without causing some new problem of a canonical tag pointing to the page it's on? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Removing Duplicate Content Issues in an Ecommerce Store
Hi All OK i have an ecommerce store and there is a load of duplicate content which is pretty much the norm with ecommerce store setups e.g. this is my problem http://www.mystoreexample.com/product1.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChriSEOcouk
http://www.mystoreexample.com/brandname/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/appliancetype/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/brandname/appliancetype/product1.html
http://www.mystoreexample.com/appliancetype/brandname/product1.html so all the above lead to the same product
I also want to keep the breadcrumb path to the product Here's my plan Add a canonical URL to the product page
e.g. http://www.mystoreexample.com/product1.html
This way i have a short product URL Noindex all duplicate pages but do follow the internal links so the pages are spidered What are the other options available and recommended? Does that make sense?
Is this what most people are doing to remove duplicate content pages? thanks 🙂0