🔪♾️ Killing Your Syndicated Content -- The SEM Daily: 5.3.23
Google pulls the plug on this specific use case of a canonical tag...
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Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Searcheye and focuses on the use of canonical tags for syndicated content.
Recently, Google made an update to their canonicalization troubleshooting page:
“The canonical link element is not recommended for those who wish to avoid duplication by syndication partners, because the pages are often very different. The most effective solution is for partners to block indexing of your content. For more, see Avoid article duplication in Google News, which also has advice about blocking syndicated content from Google Search.”
One possible reason for this change, as Barry from SE Land succinctly summarized, is:
Previous Google advice was to require those who syndicated your content to use a canonical tag to communicate to Google that the content is being copied from your site. The issue is, it didn’t always stop syndicated content from outranking the original source. Google did suggest you either block or use the canonical tag, Google wrote then “Publishers that allow others to republish content can help ensure that their original versions perform better in Google News by asking those republishing to block or make use of canonical. Google News also encourages those that republish material to consider proactively blocking such content or making use of the canonical, so that we can better identify the original content and credit it appropriately.”
So there you have it: if you’re syndicating your content across a few different websites, Google says you should stop using a canonical tag and instead block the syndicated page from being indexed at all.
Coming up: my take on this whole situation. But first:
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My Take
Well this is a bit of a cluster F.
Google’s general advice here is “oh hey, are you syndicating your content? Just asks Forbes or whomever’s SEO and dev team to noindex that page, I’m sure they’ll be FINE with it.
I get it… it wasn’t really a perfect system—it didn’t work 100% of the time.
But it feels like content creators that rely on bigger platforms syndicating their content have just been kicked out of the house like when Fred Flintstone’s saber-tooth cat kicks him out of the house during the end-credits of every episode:
BOOM!
How do you like that super-dated reference??
But seriously, if you are syndicating content anywhere, prepare for some pain as you could be impacted by a future duplicate content-shaped penalty…
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Until tomorrow…
Sean Markey
sem@hey.com
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