: How should cross site canonical meta links be placed? Should they be different per page and should they go on the canonical domain itself? I have a website available via www.mydomain.com that

Posted in: #CanonicalUrl #Domains #DuplicateContent #RelCanonical #Url

I have a website available via mydomain.com that is also available via svr7464z.vps.hostingcompanycom. The content is 100% identical, it's a mirror.

I don't want search engines to know about svr7464z.vps.hostingcompany.com and probably they never will but just in case they do I want to avoid duplicate content issues.

Unfortunately, blocking the offending URL is not possible and neither are 301-redirects.

So it seems rel=canonical should come to my rescue, but I'm confused where to place it.

Do I have to place the tags only on the svr7464z.vps.hostingcompanycom pages or also on the pages available via the official domain mydomain.com?
Also, do the tags have to be different based on the page?

For example:

For: svr7464z.vps.hostingcompany.com
Tag: link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com"

For: svr7464z.vps.hostingcompany.com/about
Tag: link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/about"

For: svr7464z.vps.hostingcompany.com/contact
Tag: link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/contact"

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Posted in: #Goals #GoogleAnalytics

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Posted in: #BingWebmasterTools #CrawlRate

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@Heady270

Canoninical tags do have to be different per page. Pointing all your canonical tags at the home page is a mistake that will lead to Google only indexing your home page.

You may place the canonical tag on either the alternate pages only, or on both the alternate and mydomain.com pages. You may place the canonical tag on both versions because self referencing canonical tags are OK. As Google's Maile Ohye says:

Yes, it's absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel="canonical". It won't harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you.

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@Courtney195

You place the canonical tag in the header of the pages on svr7464z.vps.hostingcompanycom.

So why place it at svr7464z.vps.hostingcompanycom? When Google (or another search engine) wants to crawl svr7464z.vps.hostingcompanycom, it sees the canonical tag and it's like 'Hey, I should crawl mydomain.com, not this website!'.

For example:

<html>
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="www.mydomain.com" />
</head>
</html>

There's just one more thing I would like to add. You say:

The content is 100% identical, it's a mirror.

But how can you be so sure? When a VirtualHost isn't used, svr7464z.vps.hostingcompanycom and mydomain.com are probably the same website, which is reached through those (^) two domain names.

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: How should cross site canonical meta links be placed? Should they be different per page and should they go on the canonical domain itself? I have a website available via www.mydomain.com that

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