301s vs. rel=canonical for duplicate content across domains

[jamesm5i]

Howdy mozzers,

I just took on a telecommunications client who has spent the last few years acquiring smaller communications companies. When they took over these companies, they simply duplicated their site at all the old domains, resulting in a bunch of sites across the web with the exact same content. Obviously I'd like them all 301'd to their main site, but I'm getting push back.

Am I OK to simply plug in rel=canonical tags across the duplicate sites? All the content is literally exactly the same.

Thanks as always

[jamesm5i]

Awesome - thanks Matthew.

[jamesm5i]

Thanks Ade. This is really helpful. Much appreciated!

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hey,

You can do cross domain canonicals. Google does support that (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA) and the one time I had to use that, it did seem to help. That being said, I'm not sure if Bing supports that or not.

Hope that helps.

[AdeLewis]

Hi James,

Using a rel=canonical will work but I am guessing that at some point your client will want to updated the content of their website. If you do go for rel=canonical then this would mean that you would have to also update that same content to all of the other domains.

Depending on your domain/website hosting set-up you may be able to get around this by adding all of the duplicate domains as Parked Domains on the website hosting server but this can get very messy.

Unless there is a really good reason not to then I would use 301's.

If any of the domains has been hit with the Penguin update then I wouldn't use a 301 for those domains.

Cheers.

Ade.