Using "rel canonical" with multiple sites

[eddieredwood]

This post is deleted!

[NakulGoyal]

Edward

I think you are setup 100% correctly. You only have the canonical tag on the listing page and not on any of the other pages. Those listings are essentially duplicate content amongst multiple sites and that's a perfect use scenario of the canonical tag which support cross domain.

I think you are setup 100% right and this is how it should be.

[Dr-Pete]

Agreed. There's always a trade-off - on the one hand, this does protect you from duplicate content and help the main site rank. On the other hand, the canonical tags will keep the property pages on the niche regional sites from ranking. Unfortunately, you can't really have it both ways, and I think your currently implementation is the better choice. I think it's especially true for real estate, where some of your listing content will come from the MLS data and will be duplicated across other people's sites as well. The more you can focus your ranking power on one listing, the better off you'll be long-term.