Two sites with same content

[Evoe]

Hi Everyone,

I am having two listing websites. Website A&B are marketplaces

• Website A approx 12k listing pages

• Website B :

• approx 2k pages from one specific brand.

• The entire 2k listings on website B do exist on website A with the same URL structure with just different domain name.

• Just header and footer change a little bit. But body is same code.

The listings of website B are all partner of a specific insurance company. And this insurance company pays me to maintain their website. They also look at the traffic going into this website from organic so I cannot robot block or noindex this website. How can I be as transparent as possible with Google. My idea was to apply a canonical on website B (insurance partner website) to the same corresponding listing from website A. Which would show that the best version of the product page is on website A. So for example :www.websiteb.com/productxxx would have a canonical pointing to : www.websitea.com/productxxxwww.websiteb.com/productyyy would have a canonical pointing to www.websitea.com/productyyyAny thoughts ? Cheers

[DonnaDuncan]

Evoe,

Your plan is a good one assuming: (1) you want searchers to see insurance website A vs insurance partner website B pages in search results; and (2) you're okay with Google Search Console consolidating all search metrics into the canonical URL in performance reports.

.

[jasongmcmahon]

Seems like you'll be well covered as long as you take the time to ensure that the conical URLs are correctly applied to the site & have some sort of testing processes in place.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Evoe

If the partner is paying you to maintain Website B then it is vitally important that you keep that one alive. In this case, I would canonicalise the other way round so that all of their pages on Website A are canonicalised to Website B. You would need to make the pages different from website A to continue to rank.

However

If you do not do this then Website B will disappear all together form SERPS and the company will not see any activity.

If it was my site I would remove Website B completely and canonicalize their pages to the version on Website A, (as you have suggested) but bear in mind that they will not be able to see Website B. When you canonicalize to A the organic traffic will collapse anyway so you may as well remove it.

Then you can report the stats for their pages on Website A, the primary site.

You cannot keep both with canonicals as you have said and still get organic traffic to Website B!

Regards Nigel

[effectdigital]

I like how Nigel thinks