Tired of Outranking Yourself?
"I'm tired of sites I syndicate to outranking me in Google!"
If you, your partners or your clients have uttered these words -- then Google's announcement late last year about the cross-domain canonical tag may have been exciting news.
The problem was, Google's Matt Cutts was pretty vague about how, this could be used by syndicators and their subscribers. See below:
Q: I'm offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel="canonical"?
A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel="canonical", if both parties agree.
But Vanessa Fox of NinebyBlue tackled that exact topic on her "Office Hours" podcast and shared more details about how it could be used to point Google to your original piece of content, thereby re-establishing it as not only the source, but potentially as the preferred version to rank. Some sites don't care, one colleague at TVGuide.com states their content is regularly outranked by syndication partner, seattlepi.com, but that the content and link exposure is what they value. But what about those of us, who do care about the Google juice?
In short, if my "Man Bites Dog" stories are syndicated to larger sites with more domain authority, chances are pretty good they could outrank me for my own content. This development poses an option to address that.
Vanessa lacked live examples for reference though. She, and I, and countless other media types, would love to hear of anyone's experience with the rel=canonical tag in cross-domain usage.
Anyone ... Beuller ... anyone?
 |
Have a question? Comment below, or e-mail me | Subscribe via e-mail or RSS |
