Canonical when using others sites

[mrdjdevil]

Hi all,

I was wondering if this is a good way to safely have content on our website.

We have a job search website, and we pull content from other sites. We literally copy the full content text from it's original source, and paste it on our own site on an individual job page. On every individual job page we put a canonical link to the original source (which is not my own website).

On each job page, when someone wants to apply, they are redirected to the original job source.

As far as I know this should be safe. But since it's not our website we are canonical linking to, will this be a problem?

To compare it was indeed.com does, they take 1 or 2 senteces from the original source and put it as an excerpt on their job category page (ie "accountant in new york" category page). When you click the excerpt/title you are redirected to the original source.

As you might know, indeed.com has very good rankings, with almost no original content whatsoever. The only thing that is unique is the URL of the indeed.com category where it's on (indeed.com/accountant-new-york), and sometimes the job title. Excerpt is always duplicate from other sites. Why does this work so well? Will this be a better strategy for us to rank well?

[dynamyt100]

This seems to be a tough one - similar in many ways to an e-commerce site. As far as Im aware the canonical link will only work on the same domain, I stand to be corrected. In terms of duplicating the content you will end up being penalized by Panda at some stage.

[adammason]

Hi Nevil

Google does support cross domain canonical tags as they announced here: here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.htm

However I am not sure this is the best strategy for you. When you use a canonical tag you are basically telling Google not to index that page but the one in the canonical tag instead. If Google listens to this it means your job pages will not be indexed in Google.

The better strategy for this would be similar to Indeed's where you take a snippet of the job, add your own unique content to the page and then have the call to action button link to the original job itself. This should give that page the best chance to rank.

Indeed is a tough example to use. They are pretty much number 1 for every job related term with a site that is extremely thin. I believe Google has listed this site similar to Wikipedia where it is a credible source for jobs and they give it additional weight. How fair Google is being here has been a long debate of mine

I hope this helps