I read about canonical tags in HTML and from what I understood it is used to help search engines to realize which is the original content. I have articles in my recently created blog, which I have pasted in certain other popular websites. In those websites I gave back a link to my original blog post with the canonical tag. But yet my blog page is not visible in search engines (other websites do show my article). Before I had pasted onto other websites, my articles were indexed on google and could be seen on the 1st page. So I guess, there is no problem on my SEO part.
Can someone please suggest a method where my original blog gets higher preference for the content?
You can use cross domain canonical tags.
So if you have duplicated content on other domains you can use the canonical tag on those pages pointing back to the original page on your site.
This a great way to deal with syndicated content; of course you would need code level access on these other websites so you can implement the canonical tag.
More info below
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Don't just copy paste your articles on every place on the internet, that will not do you any good. After writing a good article go to other sites and write something else about your articles like what your article is about, how it is helpful to someone, something like that so that people and websites come to your website to read your article. For this you don't need "canonical"
If you copy paste articles to other websites, it will only create duplicate content issues and will only harm your SEO efforts.
No, it is not required for your Blog section to do canonical issue.
Canonical means Google displays same pages with different URL.
The first thing is not submitting your article in different websites I will not give you any benefit in your ranking. If you write a good and quality content you should post in only one website if you post in different sited google will consider as a duplicate content. So it's better for you you can share your approved blog link in social media sites and also do social bookmarking, microblogging. And after you don't need canonical tag.
As #moobot said you can indeed use a cross-domain canonical tag to let Google know about the original source of the content. How exactly are you adding the canonical on other domains?
The canonical link should be in the head section of the html code. If you're adding it yourself somewhere in the body tag that's not going to do you any good.
Check out this article for some other common mistakes with the canonical tag
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
#metadice mentioned that copying your content all over the web isn't good for your SEO and i agree completely. If you do this for some extra backlinks or something i would recommend you to stop doing this.
Hope my answer will help someone who has this same question.
Related
A contact of ours would like to repost our blog content on their website but I’ve always been told not to do this as it would be seen as duplicate content by google and hurt our SEO and drive traffic away. Is this correct?
It is indeed bad practice. Google is good at picking up who posted the article first and who has the duplicate content. If your contact is ok with it they can add a canonical tag pointing to the page that they took the content from that will make clear to google that they do not want rankings from doing so and that the original content is at your page.
Regards
I hope my question is not too irrelevant to stackoverflow.
this is my website: http://www.rader.my
It's a car information website. The content is dynamic. Therefore, google crawler could not find all the cars specification pages in my website.
I created a sitemap with all my cars URL in it (for instance: http://www.rader.my/Details.php?ID=13 is for one car). I know I haven't made any mistake in my .xml file format and structure. But after submission, google only indexed one URL which is my index.php.
I have also read about rel="canonical". But I don't think in my case I should use such a thing since all my pages ARE different with different content but only the structure is the same.
Is there anything that I missed? Why google doesn't accept my URLs even though the contents are different? What can I do to fix this?
Thanks and regards,
Amin
I have a similar type of site. Google is good about figuring out dynamic sites. They'll crawl the pages and figure out the unique content as time goes on. Give it time.
You should do all the standard things:
Make sure each page has a unique H1 tag.
Make sure each page has substantial unique content
Unique keywords and description tags aren't as useful as they used to be but they can't hurt.
Cross-link internally. Create category pages that include links to all of one manufacturer and have each of the pages of that manufacturer link back to 'similar' pages.
Get links to your pages. Nothing helps getting indexed like external authority.
I've developed a service that allows users to search for stores on www.mysite.com.
I also have partners that uses my service. To the user, it looks like they are on my partners web site, when in fact they are on my site. I have only replaced my own header and footer, with my partners header and footer.
For the user, it looks like they are on mysite.partner.com when in reality they are on partner.mysite.com.
If you understood what I tried to explain, my question is:
Will Google and other search engines consider this duplicate content?
Update - canonical page
If I understand canonical pages correctly, www.mysite.com is my canonical page.
So when my partner uses mysite.partner.com?store=wallmart&id=123 which "redirects" (CNAME) to partner.mysite.com?store=wallmart&id=123, my server recognize my sub-domain.
So what I need to do, is to dynamically add the following in my <HEAD> section:
<link rel="canonical" href="mysite.com?store=wallmart&id=123">
Is this correct?
It's duplicate content but there is no penalty as such.
The problem is, for a specific search Google will pick one version of a page and filter out the others from the results. If your partner is targeting the same region then you are in direct competition.
The canonical tag is a way to tell Google which is the official version. If you use it then only the canonical page will show up in search results. So if you canonicalise back to your domain then your partners will be excluded from search results. Only your domains pages will ever show up. Not good for your partners.
There is no win. The only way your partners will do well is if they have their own content or target a different region and you don't do the canonical tag.
So your partners have a chance, I would not add the canonical. Then it's down to the Google gods to decide which of your duplicate pages gets shown.
Definitely. You'll want to use canonical tagging to stop this happening.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Yes. It will be considered as duplicate content by Google. Cause you have replaced only footer and header. By recent Google algorithm, content should be unique for website or even blog. If content is not unique, your website will be penalized by Google.
Here'y the story: I have a website for a local company that publishes quality content to an on-site blog. We're expanding to a new geographic region, and I'm in the process of building another website targeting the new region.
I'd like to include a blog on the new website, which will pull in any content/posts from our existing blog. I primarily want to do this for the added SEO benefit of having fresh, relevant content that's frequently updated on your website. However, I would of course need to add a rel=canonical link back to the original blog in order to ensure I don't get any duplicate content penalties from posting the same content across two separate domains.
My question is whether adding that rel=canonical link will eliminate the SEO value of that content being posted to the new website?
I'm not really talking about which blog post would show up in SERPs, as I understand that the point of the rel=canonical tag is to provide attribution to the primary source of the content. I'm more concerned about whether using a rel=canonical on the content would eliminate the secondary SEO benefit of having relevant, frequently updated content on your website, due to Google being essentially "blind" to the duplicate content.
In most cases the answer on your question is "yes". With regard to Google - GoogleAnswers (see the last question).
Other search engines can not maintain this attribute.
Regards.
If you pull content from somewhere else to post, it isn't "fresh". Fresh content is newly written. You won't get any credit for fresh content whether or not you use rel=canonical
The canonical tag behaves in a similar way to a 301 redirect. That is, ranking that the page with the canonical tag has will mostly get transferred to the page it points it.
My neighbour popped over last night to ask me for help with regards to his company's website. He said that it used to be ranked pretty high on Google but has since fallen off completely.
Now, I'm a Windows App programmer hence my request for help. I took a look and there the meta tags seem ok. I recommended that he add a <h1>heading</h1> to the pages with a page title to help reinforce the content.
I also suggested that finding related websites and getting them to link to his site was good for search ranking.
Are there any other general strategies / tools that could help?
He site is: http://www.colofinder.co.uk/
ps. BTW: this isn't just an attempt to have StackOverflow link to my neighbour's site - I'm aware that links from SO don't add to its ranking.
Go to http://ooyes.net/blog/a-step-by-step-15-minute-seo-audit-%28a-sample-from-seo-secrets%29 and read it. Then go to http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/ and read it. Then go to your friends site and look at it with that information in mind. Off the top of my head, I would add flip the company name and page title in the "title" tags. Look at the google analytics account and see how people are coming to the site. That will give you an idea of where you should start your efforts to build a workable base.
First of all he needs to be make sure that his website contents are well managed and to the point. Then Page title has to be pin point, meta tags are obsolete so try meta description. Then Main Heading should be under h1 tag, sub heading under h2 and further sub heading h3. Try to update your website one in a month.
Use community websites like Facebook, Twitter and linkidin and other related forums for posting updates about completed projects and must give inbound links. You can use your company name as an inlink to your primary website and project name as an inlink of subpage of your company website.
Keep on posting at least once in a week. Post website URL to online directories will be a great help. Do not use Blackhat SEO techniques like cloaking. Do not use any invisible text/div in your website. Make sure that whenever you give your website link any where, give the most to the point and appropriate link.
Your link should have to have that stuff against you are posting your link/sublink. Make a section on your website for tag clouds/google tags, this will be a great attraction for search engines and they will link your website to other popular websites.
Make sure these tags should be directed to top ranking website which should have relevant material. I hope this will help. Feel free if you have trouble to understand anything i have mentioned above. Best of Luck