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Originally Posted by BFT3K
Just to play devil's advocate, let's pretend you own a site called SockSuckers.com, and you start an affiliate program. You have had the site for years, and your search engine positioning is very good. In fact, any time someone types in socksucking or sock suckers or sock sucking, you come up number one.
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Fine, but I canīt see the relation to the canonical tag.
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Now you open yourself up to affiliates. A few of your affiliates are now using the same meta-tags and keywords, etc, to also come up super high in the search, so now you are losing revenue from organic searches, where before, you owned the position 100%.
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You are always on risk to lose SEO positions. Itīs not a matter of accepting affiliates.
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To add insult to injury, a few weeks down the road your affiliate decides to stop promoting you, and switches out your links for SockLovers.com, but leaves all of the same SEO info in place.
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Using the canonical tag does not help so far. That tag simply cuts off the aff code from your URL. It does not prevent your affiliates using your keywords and get better SEO listings.
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Now you are not only fucked over for losing the search engine positioning you already had before the affiliate jumped onboard, but you are actually losing it to a competing site to boot!
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Your URL will never send any sales to a competitor. If Iīm using my own site and URL with those metatags and keywords, the canonical tag wonīt help.
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I think the knife cuts both ways. I'm not certain who's right on this one...
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I donīt think so. The tag only works on your own URL and cuts off the aff_id. So if Iīm using metatgs and keywords for my own URL, you canīt stop me getting traffic for those keywords. The tag only works if I get your URL with my aff_id listed.
"Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com."