Confirmation regarding canonical and syndication google tags

[jarrett.mackay]

Hi,

We are in the process of improving our CMS upstream to resolve our duplicate content issues.  We were hit pretty hard by the Panda update.  One of the steps we have taken is implementation of the canonical link tag across all domains in our site.

You see, we are a news release service with muliple channels and websites to represent each.  The problem is that a client will submit a release and in many cases the news item is relevant to multiple channels I.E. multiple websites under the same IP range.

Site Examples:
www.hotelnewsresource.com www.restaurantnewsresource.com
www.travelindustrywire.com

From a user perspective, it makes sense that they should be able to access the article from the site they are browsing without being redirected to the site we feel carries the most relevance.  We hope the canconical tag will resolve this issue for us.

I have also read about the syndication tag and was looking for feedback or recommendations if we should implement that also, but it may be overkill as the two tags objectives seem to be similar.

I guess my first question is if the syndication tag is only used by Google News.

Secondly, and a little off topic is that we also offer an API and like many other sites, I have read, our content partners are now doing better in primary and long tail rankings even thought we are the original source.  My assumption is that we should modify the API to force using both caconical and syndication tags as well.

Lastly, I´m curious if anyone has tested the original source tag and if we should implement that as well.

Thanks everyone.

Jarrett

[aarondicks]

Jarrett, the canonical tag you have in place will suffice. I'd suggest either to have users moving between the sites in the future or to modify your CMS to auto add the canonical tag in any future posts. It might be worth speaking to your syndication partners and changing your API to only show an excerpt with a link back to your site. This will also eliminate the duplicate issues and allow more of your pages to rank. It's highly unlikely for you to get your larger media partners to add a rel=canonical to your posts on their site as they simply don't need to, as they are more likely getting the content indexed.

Aaron