Is this an ideal rel=canonical situation?
-
Hey Moz community,
Thanks for taking time to answer my question.
I'm working directly with a hospital that has several locations across the country. They've copied the same content over to each of their websites. Could I point the search engines back to a singular location (URL) using the rel=canonical tag?
In addition, does the rel=canonical tag affect the search engine rankings of the URLs (about 13 of them) that use the rel=canonical tag?
If I'm on track, is there an ideal URL (location) to decide has the original content?
This is actually the first time I've ever needed to use rel=canonical (if applicable).
Thanks so much.
Cole
-
Hi Cole,
Unfortunately there is a solution for this for international duplication but not national. If we were talking about international locations, the solution is the hreflang tag. I'll link to it here just in case it's of use in the future: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Nationally, canonicalisation will remove the non-canonical versions from the index and of course from rankings, as Chris has said.
I've looked at medical queries in the past, and Google is very adept at taking IP into account when returning results, the fact that it thinks my IP is located an hour's drive south of here notwithstanding
I would say that re-written content is your best bet if you can't use one page listing multiple locations (highly unlikely) and truly need separate sites for all 13. There can be a little cross-over / duplication without causing too much worry, but I would be concerned that Google is not good enough at a national level to differentiate between duplicates in the same way it can do this for internationalisation.
-
Hey Chris,
Thanks for the response.
I do not see any solutions here to be honest other than write the content over again.
Considering Google takes your IP Address location into consideration when you search a term such as "hospitals," I want each location to be able to rank for our list of target keywords. Thus, the rel=canonical may not be an option at this point.
Can anyone else comment on the ranking of pages (with duplicate content)?
Thanks again.
Cole
-
Hiya Cole,
Thanks for taking the time to write to us!
Well you can point them all to one site _but_the side affect of this would be the other sites might not rank, this could be problematic if e.g someone wanted to look for the content locally like "hospitals in London" (I'm not sure whats duplicated so use your imagination bit!). If you do implement the redirect across sites it's also a good idea to put a link on the page pointing towards the original content.
There is some great info on the tag here :
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
Other options that might help you is to rewrite the content, block the page in robots (bit harsh though). remove the content and just point the link to one but giving it a bit of a boost. 301 the users and bots to original content. I'm sure there are lots of other options and the choice is yours.
I hope some of that info will get you started, to be honest it may just be easier to use the tag along with just reiterating it with a link. This is helpful if you're not fussed by any index issues for the hospitals.
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
-
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
Pros and Cons of using rel=next on blog posts
Hi there, at the bottom of my website's blog posts the rel=prev and rel=next tags are used on links that point to the previous article that was posted and the next article that was posted. Often these articles are not 'linked' in terms of their content or message. Is this the correct use of rel=next/prev and if not what are the possible negative effects. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Bee1590 -
Questions about canonicals
Howdy Moz community, I had a question regarding canonicals. I help a business with their SEO, and they are a service company. They have one physical location, but they serve multiple cities in the state. My question is in regards to canonicals and unique content. I hear that a page with slightly differing content for each page won't matter as much, if most of the content is relevantly the same. This business wants to create service pages for at least 10 other cities they service. The site currently only have pages that are targeting one city location. I was wondering if it was beneficial to use a template to service each city and then put a canonical there to say that it is an identical page to the main city page? Example: our first city was san francisco, we want to create city pages for santa rosa, novato, san jose and etc. If the content for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, city were the same content as the 1st city, but just had the slight change with the city name would that hurt? Would putting a canonical help this issue, if i alert that it is the same as the 1st page? The reason I want to do this, is because I have been getting concerns from my copywriter that after the 5th city, they can't seem to make the services pages that much different from the first 4 cities, in terms of wording of the content and its structure. I want to know is there a simpler way to target multiple cities for local SEO reasons like geo targeted terms without having to think of a completely new way to write out the same thing for each city service page, as this is very time consuming on my end. Main questions? Will making template service pages, changing the city name to target different geographic locations and putting a canonical tag for the new pages created, and referring back to the main city page going to be effective in terms of me wanting to rank for multiple cities. Will doing this tell google my content is thin or be considered a duplicate? Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Need Advice: How should we handle this situation?
Hi Folks, We have a blog post on one of our sites that ranked very highly for lucrative term for about a period of two months. It had over 2000 Facebook likes, about 20 tweets and the same amount of Google +1's. The post ended up receiving several high quality natural links, and we also pointed a few authoritative links to it from our network of sites. After we saw the ranking starting to slip we did a bit of link building (which we shouldn't have done) and ended up making a big mistake. The link building company was only supposed to do 30 links and they ended up doing 600. Once we figured it out, we immediately submitted a disavow request and told Google about our mistake. I also thought maybe we then had a manual spam penalty applied so I also submitted a reconsideration request (and also told them about our mistake) but got back a canned reply saying "no manual penalties" were found. After we did all that, we saw the rankings fall out of the top 50 with the next 10 days. I'm confident we can throw up a new similar blog post and see close the same rankings we experienced with the original post. But before I do that, I have two questions: Should we 301 the old post to the new post? Could that some how "pass" the bad rankings along to the new post? What should we do about the natural links we received? Should we try and reach out to the sites and get them to change their links to the new post? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn810 -
Duplicate Page Content / Rel Canonical
Hi, The diagnostics shows me that I have 590 Duplicate Page Content , but when it shows the Rel Canonical I have over 1000, so dose that mean I have no Duplicate Page Content problem? Please help.
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Using a canonical tag to eliminate ID variables?
My research on seomoz has resulted in conflicting ideas regarding the canonical tag. One article says avoid it, the other says embrace it. We have fixed a majority of our architecture problems using redirects for duplicate content, however, when we send out newsletters we still have these pesky tracking ids. I figured out how to remove them from analytics, but am unsure of how this affects our SEO. An example of one of our links is: https://www.quicklearn.com/transcript/?utm_source=news101011&utm_medium=e&utm_campaign=newclass&nlid=news101011&UID=2287 The original url being www.quicklearn.com/transcript/ the custom (non-Google) variables being nlid and uid. Is this a problem? Do I need rel cononical tags on each and every page?
Technical SEO | | QuickLearnTraining0 -
Rel - canonical vs 301 redirect
I have multiple product pages on my site - what is better for rankings in your experiance? If I 301 the pages to 1 correct version of the product page - or if I rel caanonical to the one correct page?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610 -
Canonical for non-exist URL ?
Hi I have a website what has parameter URL. For example www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2 I want that search engine see my page URL as; www.example.com/toys/cars But this URL is not exist in my website. And when i externally enter this page it goes to 404 page. If i add canonical url as www.example.com/toys/cars to the page www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2, what happened ? Is the url at the serp change as www.example.com/toys/cars ?
Technical SEO | | SEMTurkey0