Canonical tag query - specific example

Started by ptsol, 04-17-2013, 05:50:42

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ptsolTopic starter

For technical reasons, our dev agency have suggested that we publish all content to two different sub-domains, and have a canonical tag pointing at the original version. One of the sub-domains will be local (eg uk.domain.com), and about ten percent of pages will differ between the two domains (ie they will be localised).

As I said, this approach has been for technical reasons (which I won't go into for fear of an essay), however I'm somewhat concerned about the idea of having the vast majority of our content published twice.

Will we get slapped down in Google for duplicating our content (we're using canonical tags)? There's also the fact that we've basically got two sites now, meaning that our inbound links will be split (ie some links will go to uk.domain.com, and some will go to www.domain.com).

Purely from a search point of view, what are your thoughts on this process?

Thanks in advance for any replies.
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TusharTaliyan

The cannonical tag would ensure that Google doesnot penalise the original site, however, it'll be difficult to rank to new site since most of the content is pulled from another site( no new content) and secondly, as you mentioned, the no. of links will be split between the two. However, if the subdomain is 'us.domain' and 'uk.domain', the change should serve you fine since the websites will rank locally, i.e within those countries.

Tushar Taliyan
APM, SEO/ORM, SMG Convonix - http://www.convonix.com/ [nofollow]
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seo123

If you are using canonical tags then no need to worry google won't penalize your site for duplicity. Using canonical tags will make clear to no of backlink referring to both different page ie both will have their separate backlink.

convergent

I don't understand what could be such a reason to have two similar websites, but anyway you don't need both websites in SERP
Just close one domain from indexing in robots.txt and that's ok
Free SEO help for seomastering.com users
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