Canonicals and Syndicated Content Websites
How Do I?
Hi EE community, hoping for the right advice from those in the know that use the EE platform.
We publish a website on one domain in four different regions.
Eg:
North America (mysite.com), Australia & NZ (mysite.com/au), UK & Europe (mysite.com/uk), Southeast Asia (mysite.com/sg)
All the sites are independent installations of EE (5.1.3). The content is published across all four sites - but 99% of the content is syndicated (with very minor differences such as pricing) from one of the four sites where it is published first. Which site publishes it first often varies, and some (but not much at all) is only ever published on one of the sites.
My question is how we should be handling canonicals for SEO, and further, how we can manage this within EE to make it easier for us and our editors.
Any advice on both parts of the question would be greatly appreciated as we’ve paid some “SEO experts” a number of time around this matter, only to discover they know very little about canonicals, and even less about how best practice.
Thanks in advance!
As far as I’m aware the canonical is there so search engines know which is the original version of the page/story so they can index appropriately.
So running the four sites I’d say it’s a case of using an internal process to identify the original story URL, so if the original was published on the UK site then the other three would use that link as the canonical.