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.
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
One of my client having website which is entirely based on API Content i.e. content coming from 3rd party website. He wants to do some seo on the data. I wonder if it is possible as there is data not available in his database and i think google crawler redirect to 3rd party website while crawling on such pages. We already asked for permission from that website owner to let us store API data on our end in order to do some SEO but he refused our request.
It will be highly appericited if you can suggest any other way that should not be against policies and guidelines.
Thank You
Vikas S.
Yes - with a huge BUT:
Google explains how parameters can be set within their Search Console (Google Webmaster) and how these can effect the crawler's behaviour.
#Nadeem Haddadeen is right with the canonical links between duplicates. There's also an issue if you don't have consistent content when calling up the same parameters. This essentially makes your page un-indexable as it's dynamic content. If you are dealing with dynamic content then you need to optimise a host page based around popular queries rather than trying to have your content rate itself.
It's not recommended to take the same content and post it on your website, its duplicate and Google will give you penalty.
If you still want to post it on your website, you have to make some changes on the original text and then post it on your website to look like its original.
Also if you want to keep it without any changes and to avoid any penalties from Google, you you have to add a link for the original article from your website or add a cross domain canonical link like the below example:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/original-article-url" />
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.
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.
My own CMS automatically adds new parameters to links in a page to specify a given language.
It works quite well but it doesn't always put the var in the same position, giving me a link to same page/language:
www.xxx.yy/index.php?mod=blog&page=3&lang=en
or
www.xxx.yy/index.php?mod=blog&lang=en&page=3
Will search engines be smart enough to detect both urls as the same? Or will detect as two different urls and therefore mark them as duplicated content?
I will fix this issue anyway, but I'm curious about this since long time ago.
Google definitely supports this, as they explicitly mention that example in their webmaster blog:
Like www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell and www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black. Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site's performance, but it doesn't cause penalties. From our article on duplicate content:
Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.
For all other duplicate content worries, consider specifying a canonical url.