Is Rel=Canonical the answer???
-
Hey Mozzers,
Can you help me with something please. I have some important content going live next week for a client. We work on there blog optimisation and this piece of content is going live on both the blog and parent site. The parent site has huge DA in comparions to the blog.
I want to get the traffic directed to the blog and get the blog ranking - bare in mind the content is exactly the same so it is dupe.
If I want to get the blog ranking above the parent site and to direct the traffic here is a cross domain Rel=Canonical the answer?
Has anyone else had this issue?
Thanks
Bush
-
That's great - many thanks for all of your help.
I'll update this post of any outcome as it may help others in the future.
Thanks Dr Pete
GB
-
You'll pass the PA - the impact on DA is a bit hard to estimate. It depends a lot on the strength of the individual pages, and, of course, if Google honors the tags. Once the canonical kicks in, the links won't be processed, most likely. It's a dicey proposition, though, and you'll probably need to adjust as you go. Most likely negative scenario is that the impact just isn't what you'd hoped for.
-
Hi Dr Pete,
Thanks as always. I just re-read my response and the spelling mistakes are shocking so apologies for that
Can I ask if I implement a tag page by page and choose say 10 pages to rel= canonical from the parent site to the blog will this boost the the DA of the blog? We have links from the parent site to the blog in the footer. Will a Rel=Canonical tag pass more juice over to get it ranking? We want the blog to rank for brand name only which is an exact match of the parent URL. Parent URL ranks number 1, we want blog 2, 3 or 4.
I can't go into specifics so sorry to be vague.
Thanks as always
Gareth
-
It should work, but as I mentioned, I'd stick to doing it page-by-page. If there's a blog "home" on the parent site, you could cross-domain it to the new site. Just make sure you don't cross-domain some critical, high-authority page on the main site, or you could cause yourself more harm than good. Ultimately, you're giving authority from your main site to the new site, and that's not a free transaction - everything you gain on one side costs you something on the other.
-
Hi Dr Pete,
Thanks for your answer on this. In this case the rationale behind the implementation was purely to drive traffic over to the blog (not the parent site which is well known) to get more exposure of the blog content. The piece that was released was pretty 'hot' at the time and could gain more returning visitors and exposure to the blog which in comparison is little known.
In the end is wasn't possible and the news which got lots of traction went on the parent site so tage was implemented.
I can that splitting the blog away from the parent site is messy and we always advise against this, however in this case there is internal justification for this which I can't go into here.
Thanks for everything as always
Gareth
-
Generally, I have to say that I think splitting out your blog site can do more harm than good, and splitting up AND double-posting is especially messy. I'm not sure on the business justifications, but from an SEO standpoint it's almost always trouble, long-term.
That said, cross-domain canonical should be effective here. It's a bit hard to predict, since the parent site is stronger, but done correctly, it should be low risk. I'm concerned with your implementation (in the comments), though, because it sounds like you're pointing the entire parent site to the blog site. That could be disastrous. Ideally, you'd canonical each individual blog post at the level of their unique URLs. Otherwise, you could really disrupt the ranking ability of your main site. Unfortunately, without seeing the exact site structure, I can't really tell you what the tag should look like.
-
Hi Streamline,
We have to add the tag - the snippet idea although a great idea doesn't work for them.
Can I ask you as a follow up - is the below tag correct . I would add this to the parent site and the below tag tells Google that the parent site is hosting content and the blog is the canonical versions:
The below tag to the parent site, I'll add it to the section of the parent site not the blog:
-
Hi Streamline - thanks for such a helpful response.
I'll see what I can do and post here the outcome if i use Rel=canonical as it may help others.
Cheers for everything
bush
-
Would it be possible to only post the content on the blog and then add a few paragraphs on the main site which then links to the blog for the full article? I think that would be ideal.
Otherwise, you could try using the cross domain canonical tag in order to get the blog ranking for the content. The issue is that Google considers the canonical tag to be a hint rather than an absolute directive, so it might not necessarily work. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
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
-
Hi i have a few pages with duplicate content but we've added canonical urls to them, but i need help understanding what going on
hi google is seeing many of our pages and dupliates but they have canonical url on there https://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/maxi-shirt-dress.html has tags https://www.hijabgem.com/maxi-shirt-dress.html
On-Page Optimization | | hijabgem
has tagshttps://www.hijabgem.com/index.php/quickview/index/view/id/4693
has tags
my question is which page takes authority?and are they setup correct, can you have more than one link rel="canonical" on one page?0 -
Canonical in Shop Areas of an E-commerce Site. When and Where?
Hi Guys. A quick one about duplicate content... So we have a lot of pages that are very similar on our site, but are actually different products. e.g) Our Fortnight view refills and our week to view refills. Our MOZ report defines this as duplicate content. Question: Would a canonical tag be the way to go to 'remove' this duplicate content? And if so, which page should it point back to? Just picking one of the products? Or the higher level Landing page? Many thanks in advance... Isaac.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Is there a limit to the number of duplicate pages pointing to a rel='canonical ' primary?
We have a situation on twiends where a number of our 'dead' user pages have generated links for us over the years. Our options are to 404 them, 301 them to the home page, or just serve back the home page with a canonical tag. We've been 404'ing them for years, but i understand that we lose all the link juice from doing this. Correct me if I'm wrong? Our next plan would be to 301 them to the home page. Probably the best solution but our concern is if a user page is only temporarily down (under review, etc) it could be permanently removed from the index, or at least cached for a very long time. A final plan is to just serve back the home page on the old URL, with a canonical tag pointing to the home page URL. This is quick, retains most of the link juice, and allows the URL to become active again in future. The problem is that there could be 100,000's of these. Q1) Is it a problem to have 100,000 URLs pointing to a primary with a rel=canonical tag? (Problem for Google?) Q2) How long does it take a canonical duplicate page to become unique in the index again if the tag is removed? Will google recrawl it and add it back into the index? Do we need to use WMT to speed this process up? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | dsumter0 -
What is the recommended canonical variation for a website now migrated to Https:?
We recently migrated our site to HTTPS:? In the past, we went with http://www. What is the recommended canonical variation corresponding to these changes? http:// http://www. https:// https://www. Thank you! Erin
On-Page Optimization | | HiddenPeak0 -
I'm using Canonical URL but still receiving message - Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Hello, I checked my site and it looks like everything is setup correctly for canonical url but I keep getting the message that it's not. Am I doing something wrong? SORRY I FIGURED IT OUT! THANK YOU! HOW DO I DELETE THIS?
On-Page Optimization | | seohlp440 -
Category page canonical tag
I know this question has been asked a few times on here but I'm looking for very specific advice. Currently when you go to a category, say http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html, a canonical tag is added to the head of the page. There are plenty of "variant" pages which carry the same tag, for example: /range.html?p=2
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson9
/range.html?p=3
/range.html?dir=asc&order=price
/range.html?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price Is it wise to push the "link juice" for each of these variant pages to the top level page? Or should each variant page have its own unique canonical tag? After reading many blog posts, guides and papers I'm truly confused! Any general guidance or recommendations would be much appreciated. Chris.1 -
Rel canonical tag question
Im trying to to fix my duplicate content problem with my catagory pages in my shopping cart. I have read about adding a rel canonical tag to the page so it links back to the main catagory page. So if I add a rel canonical tag to the main catagory page it will show up on every other page for that catagory like page 1 page 2 and so on and it will have the tag linking back to the main cat. That should fix it it right? Now that being said I cant seem to add the tag invetween the head tags. I can add it to the body where I can add content. Will the rel canonical tag work outside the head tags? Any other ideas on this fix? I contacted my people that host the cart to see if they have any features to help this will see what they say.
On-Page Optimization | | Dataken0 -
Is rel=canonical used only for duplicate content
Can the rel-canonical be used to tell the search engines which page is "preferred" when there are similar pages? For instance, I have an internal page that Google is showing on the first page of the SERPs that I would prefer the home page be ranked for. Both the home and internal page have been optimized for the same keyword. What is interesting is that the internal page has very few backlinks compared to the home page but Google seems to favor it since the keyword is in the URL. I am afraid a 301 will drop us from the first page of the SERPs.
On-Page Optimization | | surveygizmo0