I had a client a couple of months ago who had a bit of a problem with his websites ranking for various keywords. The client was an online shop selling gadgets to the general public and also a separate online wholesale supplier for the same gadgets to retailers. They had two websites: one for general retail and one for the traders.
The problem was some of the products from the wholesale website were ranking greater in the SERPs for the equivalent products on the online retail shop for certain keywords. On closer inspection I noticed what was causing the problem – the duplicate content.
I asked the client which website gets the content published to it first and they replied with the wholesale website and then it goes on to the retail website. Both are nearly identical to each other and even the URL structures are the same.
This is when I thought of a cracking use for the canonical tag.
I wrote up a report for the client’s web dev and how to implement the canonical tag on the wholesale website and the retail website also.
The introduction to the report went:
“Canonicalisation issues occur when there’s a page of content available at multiple URLs. From an perspective, search engines may crawl several websites/pages and find the same information duplicated on each URL. This causes an issue because search engines don’t know which is the original document to display in the search engine results pages.
This is a problem with your wholesale site and your retail site. Ideally we want the content to look original to the retail site for all categories and products and not for the wholesale site. This document will discuss the best way to achieve this and offer recommendations to the web designers.”
And the solution was an explanation of the use of the canonical tag in a way that meant we saw positive results. That being once the workaround was implemented, we saw the products on the retail website start to outrank those on the wholesale website. The following is what I put in to the report:
Using an attribute for the <link /> tag you can tell the search engines which URL is the true source of the original content. Its format is below:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.domain.com/path-to-original/content” />
This tag should be placed on the page containing the original content on the domain for the retail website and on the page at the wholesale site containing the duplicate content. The URL in the href above for the wholesale website should be the same as that on the retail website as the URL structures are the same for each.
The link should be placed in between the <head></head> tags. For example:
<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”www.retail-site.com/path-to-the-product/p-56r223″ />
…
…
…
</head>
For that particular product above this XHTML should be placed on both the retail website & the wholesale sites webpage where the duplicate content exists to inform the search engines that the retail website is the true source of the content.
Conclusion
This was the first time I had used the canonical tag on a large scale across thousands of pages and was very pleased with the results and the shear effortlessness that the canonical tag had been implemented. It resolved with minimum labour a mass canonicalisation problem for a client and his retail shops products soared back into the SERPs.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
