My latest project at work involves doing some research on whether or not I can successfully use the canonical tag across domains, and even sub-domains. Basically we host numerous amounts of awesome content on our e-commerce store in order to bring in lots of traffic from long tail as well as the unique and legitimate information our content offers. However recently I’ve re-designed our company blog and placed more attention there trying to utilize the social scene. We’ve also recently come to a crossroads where we decided that we’d rather separate product from content. In turn, meaning move all the content over to the blog, and focus strictly on selling product on the e-commerce store.
The reason we want to implement the canonical tag is that we do not want to have any duplicate issues between our blog and our main site. My feeling is that, if the canonical tag is supported across domains and sub-domains, we should definitely utilize it and post our content on our blog. It allows for us to re-use great original content that has been buried on our main e-commerce site for months and getting it in front of fresh eyes on our newly designed blog. However I could be wrong, but that’s just my opinion.
For those of you that don’t know what the canonical tag is, here is a quick synopsis according to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />
inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
After some quick Googling, it appears that Google has recently confirmed on its Webmaster Central Blog that its algorhythm does indeed support cross domain canonical tags.
Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
**Update on 12/17/2009: The answer is yes! We now support a cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element.**
I’d love to hear if anyone has done this or tested it and noticed anything strange or odd. Until then, I guess I’m going to go for it and give a whirl myself. Keep you posted as to what happens.
Update – Some more sources confirming this should work.
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