Cross domain canonical for different branded sites

[nhhernandez]

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.

[ViviCa1]

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.

[EGOL]

Rand covered rel=canonical used cross-domain as today's WhiteBoard Friday topic.

https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content

[nhhernandez]

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.

[nhhernandez]

Perfect, thanks for sharing the link!