Same content on other domain owned by de company. Canonical is not working

[teconsite]

Hi!

I am analyzing a website right now. It's a school, let's name it NEWSCHOOL. This school is owned by other school, let's name it, BIGSCHOOL

NEWSCHOOL is specialized in tourism degrees, and the BIGSCHOOL is a bigger and older one with a lot of different degrees.

What happens is that NEWSCHOOL has a course, let's name it TOURISM DEGREE.
BIGSCHOOL has that course too, with the same content, trying to help to promote the content, because this school is older, well known and has a consolidated brand internationally.

BIGSCHOOL, has placed a canonical tag, telling Google that content comes from NEWSCHOOL.

What is happening is that the result of newschool is beeing omited by google. The first result is the BIGSCHOOL content, and then a lot of training portals, where the degree content is too to increase its visibility.

So, I would like to know, how can we do to say google that the content that it should show is the one of NEWSCHOOL and not the one in BIGSCHOOL. It's pretty clear that Google knows that those portals are closed related, because it is omitting the NEWSCHOOL results.

I know that we can send a link from the content area from one portal to the other in the content we want. But... would it solve the problem... and y we have to repeat that for each degree, woudn't it be a little dangerous?

Would like to know your points of view!

Thanks!

[UmarKhan]

Hey,

It seems that Google is giving respect to "Big School" because of it's overall authority. If you like to continue this approach, you might need to work on the overall authority of "New School" to get things straight.

Frankly speaking, I wouldn't go with this strategy as there are lots of other ways to leverage your new site from the old one. For instance, you may place the attractive banners at the "Tourism" page that point to your new school and stuff like that.

I reckon your "New School" is not offering lots of degree courses so yes you can get the link from "Big School's" content but make sure, you are linking in a proper and natural way.

For more details about canonical tags FAQs, please refer to this brilliant resource from Dr.Pete,
https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

[EGOL]

It can take google a really long time to honor some rel=canonical.   I have used some and it has taken many months for all of them to be honored.

[BradsDeals]

I agree with Umar that BIGSCHOOL's overall authority is probably getting in the way. Is there any way to get a dofollow link from their course page to yours to help reinforce the linkage? Funneling a little extra juice your way certainly wouldn't hurt and it makes sense contextually.

[Linda-Vassily]

You could noindex, follow the BIGSCHOOL tourism degree page.

[EGOL]

I suggest lots of patience here.  One of the goals of the rel=canonical is to have the ranking value of the BigSchool page passed to the new domain.  If you simply do rel=canonical that will happen.   If you use noindex, nofollow, robots, meta robots or anything else then you will take, by total chance, whatever google decides to give you.

I would be willing to sit for months on this if you are going to rel=canonical route.

[teconsite]

Thanks  Umar!

What do you mean with ...

"I reckon your "New School" is not offering lots of degree courses so yes you can get the link from "Big School's" content but make sure, you are linking in a proper and natural way"

I woudn't be natural... cause both have the same owner...

[teconsite]

Thanks Rebecca! I would probably go that way!

[teconsite]

Hi!

So, your point is to wait for that to happen, isn't it? What do you think about sending a link from the BIGSCHOOL course page to the NEWSCHOOL course page? I mean, canonical + link

Thank you!

[EGOL]

On my sites, if I have rel=caononical on Page A, referring to Page B (on another domain) as the source of the content, I do have a followed link from Page A to Page B.  That link is in a sentence that says that the content was originally published on Page B on the other domain.   I do not know if this is the way that Google would have done this, but this is what I have done and I can say that the results have been excellent.  Page B does very well in the SERPs.  (Page A is on a much more powerful website.)

[Everett]

The cross-domain rel canonical tag is a "hint" to Google, not a "directive". They can and do ignore it when other signals overwhelmingly indicate that a different page is the canonical one.

My advice would be to write new content for NEWSCHOOL.

If you can't do that, consider all of the different signals that Google can use besides the rel canonical tag:

• Initial publish date of the content
• Initial indexation date
• External links pointing to the content
• Internal links pointing to the content
• Domain authority (including domain-wide links)
• Age of the domain
• How the two pages are linking to each other

Last but not least you could noindex the BIGSCHOOL version, but not the NEWSCHOOL version and leave your cross-domain rel canonical tag up.

Again, it would be best to have unique content on both sites.

[teconsite]

Thanks Everett, I agree that the best would be creating diferent content, but It is a little difficult, cause it is the explanation of the contents and programming of one course.

Thank you for your answer, and I will recomend publishing the content first in NEWSCHOOL and sending to the index before sending that content to other pages or portals!