Reinforcing Rel Canonical? (Fixing Duplicate Content)

[Travis-W]

Thanks for the info Hampig, I'll definitely take a look.

Rel Canonical actually works cross domain now, Google updated it from when it originally came out.

[BizDetox]

Zora. Totally understand, but my input and what Majority of people do is redirect the traffic.

A server side htaccess 301 Redirect is your BEST choice here.

Why dont you want o use a 301 and prefer a Rel, curious on what your take is on this.

and Thanks for the rel update info i didnt know

[Travis-W]

We chose rel canonical because we still want users to be able to visit and navigate through site 2.

They are both e-commerce sites with similar products, not exactly identical sites.

[BizDetox]

I am sorry i am not understanding why you need a rel = in this matter if the sites are two different sites?

What is your end goal ?

[gmk1567]

Zora,

Google accepts cross domain canonical as long as the pages have more similar content.

It is not necessary to add hyperlink pointing to canonical page. If your sites are crawler friendly, canonical hints will change search results very quickly.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Ensure that Google doesn't find any issue with your Sitemaps. If you add products frequently, submit the updated Sitemap following the same schedule.

All the best.

[BrianJGomez]

are these two sites on the same root domain? it seems like most of the feedback you're getting are from people who are assuming they are however, it sounds to me like there are two separate domains

[Travis-W]

Yes, sir - that would be correct.

www.consumerbase.com and www.listfinder.com.

The sites are not 100% identical, just the content on the product pages.

[Dr-Pete]

With products, it's a bit hard to say. Cross-domain canonical could work, but Google can be a bit finicky about it. Are you seeing the pages on both sides in the Google index, or just one or the other? Sorry, it's a bit hard to diagnose without seeing a sample URL.

If this were more traditional syndicated content, you could set a cross-domain canonical and link the copy back to the source. That would provide an additional signal of which site should get credit. With your case, though, I haven't seen a good example of that - I don't think it would be harmful, though (to add the link, that is).

If you're talking about 80K links, then you've got 80K+ near-duplicate product pages. Unfortunately, it could go beyond just having one or the other version get filtered out. This could trigger a Panda or Panda-like penalty against the site in general. The cross-domain canonical should help prevent this, whereas the links probably won't. I do think it's smart to be proactive, though.

Worst case, you could META NOINDEX the product pages on one site - they'd still be available to users, but wouldn't rank. I think the cross-domain canonical is probably preferable here, but if you ran into trouble, META NOINDEX would be the more severe approach (and could help solve that trouble).

[Travis-W]

Great post Peter.

Here are some links of a product that is on both sites.  Hopefully this will help you provide some more insight.

http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/shutterbugsphotography-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html
http://www.listfinder.com/mailing-lists/shutterbugsphotography-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html

The ListFinder pages are currently mostly indexed (70k out of 80k) which makes me think they are different enough from one another to not warrant a penalty.

The ConsumerBase pages started indexing well when we added the rel canonical code to LF (went from about 2k pages to 30k in early December, but since 1/2/2013 we have seen a dropoff in indexed pages down to about 5k.

Thanks!

[Dr-Pete]

Have you seen a corresponding drop-off in the ListFinder pages over that time. If the canonical is kicking in, you should see some of those pages fall out as more ConsumerBase pages kick in.

Is there a reason your canonical'ing from the more indexed site to the less indexed one. It could be a mixed signal if Google things that ListFinder is a more powerful or authoritative site. Cross-domain can get tricky fast.

Unfortunately, beyond NOINDEX'ing, it's about your best option, and certainly one of your safest. It's really hard to predict what the combo of cross-domain canonical plus link would do. From a dupe content standpoint, it's risk free. From the standpoint of creating 80K links from one of your sites to another of your sites, it's a little risky (don't want to look like a link network). Since you're only talking two sites, though, it's probably not a huge issue, especially with the canonical already in place.

Google interprets cross-domain canonical heavily, so it can be a little hard to predict and control. Interestingly, the ConsumerBase site has higher Domain Authority, but the page you provided has lower Page Authority than its "sister" page. Might be a result of your internal linking structure giving more power to the ListFinder pages.