Cross domain canonical for different branded sites
-
Hi everyone,
We are working on 5 websites that offer the same products but are of different brands and locations. They are owned by the same company, but each run independently. On the sites, they have content such as privacy policies, terms and conditions and guides that are the same across all brands. Will publishing these be flagged as duplicate content by Google? If yes, is it recommended to add rel=canonical to all duplicate pages across all sites pointing to one of the five?
We are just concerned that the 4 sites with duplicate content would be valued less than the canonical as a result of passed link equity. We are doing SEO optimisations for all and are trying to rank them well in SERPs.
If a canonical is not the best solution here, what would be the best to do apart from completely rewriting content? Is it noindex tag or turning the texts into images and adding to PDFs?
Thank you.
-
Perfect, thanks for sharing the link!
-
Thanks for this! We won't be worrying about the T&Cs and such and will try to rewrite the product pages as we work on SEO on these individual brands and are trying to rank them all in their respective locations.
-
Rand covered rel=canonical used cross-domain as today's WhiteBoard Friday topic.
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content
-
For pages like T&C etc. I wouldn't use canonicals. It is perfectly normal that all websites have pages like T&C, privacy policy and so on, and even when the websites aren't owned by the same company, they are usually quite similar. I would simply leave them as they are. You will not be penalised for duplicate content, but Google may choose to show only one of the results in organic search results.
If someone was to google "website 1 terms and conditions", Google should still choose to show the T&C of website 1 as an organic result. If you used canonicals, where website 5 is used as the canonical, you would probably have website 5 shown no matter which T&C a person is trying to find.
For product pages, you should be using different content (product descriptions) to avoid this issue. However, we have the same situation, where we have some products sold across more than one website, but we actually only want one of them to rank, so we have used cross-domain canonicals for those products. It has worked really well for us.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Does having a sub-domain on a different server affect SEO?
I'm working with a company that has a hard-coded website on the root domain, and then a WordPress blog on a subdomain on a separate server. We're planning on implementing a hub and spoke model for their content, hosting the main hubs on the root domain and the linked articles on the blog. Is having the blog on a different server going to hinder our SEO efforts?
Technical SEO | | KaraParlin0 -
Rankings are different in Different Geographical are with in the same country
Hello , I observed my ranking are different in same country but different geographical areas.Is this nature is common or we missing something. How long will it take to come to the same rankings.
Technical SEO | | medhahostingpr0 -
Disavow to all domains?
Hi there, I have several versions of my domain setup in Webmaster tools. Should I upload my disavow file against all of these domains? For example.....
Technical SEO | | niallfred
If I find a link pointing to: http://www.mydomain.com from: http://www.somespammysite.com do I need to add a disavow file in Webmaster tools for all my domain versions or only the version the offending links points towards? So... Only
http://www.mydomain.com
Or
http://www.mydomain.com
http://mydomain.com
https://www.mydomain.com
https://mydomain.com0 -
Off-site company blog linking to company site or blog incorporated into the company site?
Kind of a SEO newbie, so be gentle. I'm a beginner content strategist at a small design firm. Currently, I'm working with a client on a website redesign. Their current website is a single page dud with a page authority of 5. The client has a word press blog with a solid URL name, a domain authority of 100 and page authority of 30. My question is this: would it be better for my client from an SEO perspective to: Re-skin their existing blog and link to the new company website with it, hopefully passing on some of its "Google Juice,"or... Create a new blog on their new website (and maybe do a 301 redirect from the old blog)? Or are there better options that I'm not thinking of? Thanks for whatever help you can give a newbie. I just want to take good care of my client.
Technical SEO | | TheKatzMeow0 -
Value in Consolidating Similar Sites / Duplicate Content for Different URLs
We have 5 ecommerce sites: one company site with all products, and then four product-specific sites with relevant URL titles and products divided up between them (www.companysite.com, www.product1.com, www.product2.com, etc). We're thinking of consolidating the smaller sites into our most successful site (www.product1.com) in order to save management time and money, even though I hate to lose the product-specific URLs in search results. Is this a wise move? If we proceed, all of the products will be available on both our company site and our most successful site (www.company.com & www.product1.com). This would unfortunately give us two sites of duplicate content, since the products will have the same pictures, descriptions, etc. The only difference would be the URL. Would we face penalties from Google, even though it would make sense to continue to carry our products on our company site?
Technical SEO | | versare0 -
Updating Domain Yearly for Branding Purposes?
We host an event every year which updates it's branding to include the year (Ex. Acme 2013, Acme 2014, etc.). We used to use the branded domains (acme2012.com) to redirect to the event microsite on off of our main content site (ex. acme2012.acme.com). Just this year our event managers decided host the event on it's own domain, separating it from the content site. So it is now acme2013.com. Their strategy is to update the domain every year to include the current year, so next year the domain would be acme2014.com. I understand the use of the domain for marketing purposes but I feel like it could be hurting our SEO by doing this. Should we revert to our original strategy or is this okay with the proper setup? I should note that because this is an event promotion site, the site template and content updates every year.
Technical SEO | | accessintel0 -
Keyword in Domain or not?
My on page optimization grade is an "A" with the following factors; Factor Overview <dl class="scoreboard clearfix"> <dt>Critical Factors</dt> <dd>4 / 4</dd> <dt>High Importance Factors</dt> <dd>7 / 7</dd> <dt>Moderate Importance Factors</dt> <dd>8 / 9</dd> <dt>Low Importance Factors</dt> <dd>11 / 11</dd> <dt>Optional Factors</dt> <dd>5 / 5</dd> </dl> The main thing I appear to be missing is keywords in my URL. How truly important is that in today's SEO world and how much time or ranking would be lost if I do not have control to change the external links to my website if I decided to migrate to a keyword relevant url?
Technical SEO | | classa0 -
Site revision
our site has complete redesign including site architecture, page url and page content (except domain). It looks like a new site. The old site has been indexed about thirty thousand results by google. now what should i do first?
Technical SEO | | jallenyang0