Link + noindex vs canonical--which is better?

[nicole.healthline]

In this article http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 google mentions if you syndicate content, you should include a link and, ideally noindex, the content, if possible.

I'm wondering why google doesn't mention including a canonical instead the link + noindex?

Is one better than the other?

Any ideas?

[AgentsofValue]

It seems like two different issues to me.  If your content is syndicated on a 3rd party site, Google is saying - ask your partners to no-index the content and provide a link back to your original source.  That way your original source will rise above all of those syndicated sources (on many other places around the WWW) to be the highest ranked page

If you are optimizing your own site, they are saying be careful to avoid duplicate versions of the same page within your own site, coming about as a result of canonicalization problems.  Canonicalization problems on your site make it appear you have lots of very similar versions of the same page on your own site.

I think I can see how you got confused here - since they are talking about the topic of duplicate content in general - which can be caused either by syndication (publishing one page of content across many different sites) or canonicalization issues (where the same page of content on your own site appears on several different URLs).

Hope that helps!

[MagicDude4Eva]

If your syndication partners are reliable, the noindex option would be the best choice. This will however not guarantee you that your content will rank above the content of the syndication partner.

I would be reluctant (personal preference) to place a canonical link on the syndicated site pointing back to your domain. My biggest concern would be possible reputation issues with the syndication site hurting you.

Although I can not verify it for sure yet, it does seem that when you embed authorship information in your and the syndicated content, Google seems to favour content from the original source.

I guess the question is really why you want to have your content syndicated? If it is an attempt to build out links, I think a better option would be to provide a snippet to the syndication site, linking to your full content.

[nicole.healthline]

Hi, Cross domain canonicalization is a common practice as well (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/10/raising-awareness-of-cross-domain-url.html).

[nicole.healthline]

In fact in this post http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html, they mention using a canonical when syndicating content, if the content is similar enough--not sure why they don't mention a canonical in the webmaster guidelines link I included above.

[AgentsofValue]

Hay - thanks for those links.  I do remember reading those Webmaster Central posts a while back, but hadn't used that technique in practice ever.  I think either of the techniques requires good cooperation from your syndication partners to implement.  I think in practice, it may not always be easy to have a syndication partner add meta tags specifically for a page of content they are publishing.

In terms of which one is better - I really can't say.  I would guess that a nonindex plus a link would probably be more explicit, since in that case, the search engines don't really have to decide which is the real canonical version - since there's only one page of content existing.

Also, the way they describe cross domain canonical sounds kind of wishy-washy ---> "While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

[McCannSEO]

Can I ask a question that leads on from this - how attractive a proposition is syndicated content it to publishers if you ask them to add a noindex / cross-domain canonical as well as a link from your article? Surely they want  a chance to rank, expecially if they are planning on adding their own take and UGC, to differentiate it where possible, as Rand advises here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-leveraging-syndicated-content-effectively

Personally, content syndication is not something I would ever recommend for a client due to the complications from dupe content outweighing the benefits from links that could be earned...it just makes more work when that time could be spent on high quality guest blogging (in my view).

However, a new client is really interested in doing it. But if we offer content for those terms (link + noindex / cross domain canonical) - will there be any interest to use the syndicated articles at all?!

Maybe it would be better to offer the content in return for a link and a guarantee that they will either add unique content to it or canonicalize / noindex?