Google No Longer Recommends Canonical Tags for Syndicated Content - Noindex Instead

[Ryuzaki]

Google has made a change to it's help documents regarding Fixing Canonicalization Issues and syndicated content.

Generally what SEO's were doing in the recent past was, when they syndicated content onto their own websites or sent out items like press releases, was to include a canonicalization tag in the header. This functions kind of like a 301-redirect without the redirect part. Google would index all duplicate copies of this content and then give all the link credit and/or whatever other types of credit to the URL in the canonicalization tag. This was an attempted solution for the news industry that seemed to work okay, but there must be some reasons it's not panning out now (Google News).

So now Google is recommending NOT to use the canonical link element with syndicated content and instead to noindex the content. The reason they give is that even syndicated content ends up being "very different" (so much speculation can be had off that statement!)

Here Google offers 3 ways to Avoid article duplication in Google News:

1. Use the rel="canonical" tag
2. Disallow Googlebot-News
3. Disallow Googlebot

Seems like Google is NOT capable of dealing with duplicate content, or even content within non-semantic HTML tags it would seem. That's what I'm getting out of this. Sounds like Google News (which I never look at) is getting flooded with duplicates.

Anyways, I thought this was significant enough to share because "no longer recommending" isn't very far removed from "recommending against" which is one step from "penalizing for".

 

[Hanuman]

Is there any other use for canonical other than this particular use case? If not, why can't Google treat canonical as being similar to noindex from their side, instead of asking the millions of SEOs to change their behavior?

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Hanuman, I'm not sure what another legitimate use case would be that's not manipulative (people have used them to do "fake" 301's without technically being 301's. I'm not sure if that still works.)

But I feel like this is a case where Google can't just noindex every page that has a canonical set on it. For one, that's an overreach into changing how your own website behaves when they can handle it internally and choose not to index it (same result but without targeting the canonical as the means to get it done, but targeting content duplication).

But also, it's way too late. Many SEO's, myself included, are making every page list itself as its own canonical and any variations of that page, too (so that there's not a million versions floating around from people using URL parameters like ?fbid=1234 from social media shares, etc.) So there's gobs of pages out there with canonicals in them at this point that point somewhere that isn't always the exact same URL.

I think this makes sense, what Google is wanting to do. Canonical still has its legit intended usage to pass signals from one page to the primary version of the page. Google doesn't seem to want that to be cross-domain any more or maybe they just don't want to deal with indexing duplicates and then processing the de-indexing of them, and trying to figure out what the original is (without the canonical signal). It's much better to keep that kind of decision making in the webmaster's hands and educate them on what to do about it, I think. I don't want Google encroaching on me any further than it already does.

 

[googlealchemist]

"So now Google is recommending NOT to use the canonical link element with syndicated content and instead to noindex the content. The reason they give is that even syndicated content ends up being "very different" (so much speculation can be had off that statement!)"

What could be 'very different' about it? A bunch of additional curated content vs just a strict copy/paste?

Is this also talking about using things like iftt to syndicate blog posts and youtube videos out to various social sites or am I totally misreading this?