: Our alias domains are showing up in the search results, how can we get it to show just our main domain? There is a website, let's say example.com and multiple domains for different domain
There is a website, let's say example.com and multiple domains for different domain zones like .de .fr etc. And the additional domains have the CNAME record example.com. So the idea is to open example.com regardless of the domain zone a person enters. But what we have now is that serps list multiple domain name when we try to search for "Example". Here is the real example (data replaced):
As you can see it's obviously didn't work the way we expected. Despite that if the person clicks on the 3rd link, he will end up visiting example.com actually. But we don't want the domain to be in SERPs, especially when some domain names are just to "fix possible typos". So my question is - do we use the CNAME wrongly? Should we use A-record instead? Is there a way to make example.de go to open example.com/de and example.fr to open example.com/fr?
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Canonical Tag is only a suggestion to search engines. They may or may not follow it. Please correct me if I am incorrect, but I am assuming that your domain names are using different languages? If not, I'll scratch my response and start fresh. Keeping on with my assumption, in your situation, I believe you would be best served by utilizing your robots.txt to block search engines from crawling automatically translated pages on your site.
Robots.txt syntax is as follows:
User-agent: [the name of the robot the following rule applies to] *this could be Googlebot (for google search) and Googlebot-Image (for image search).
Disallow: [the URL path you want to block]
Allow: [the URL path in of a subdirectory, within a blocked parent directory, that you want to unblock]
These two lines are together considered a single entry in the file, where the Disallow rule only applies to the user-agent(s) specified above it. You can include as many entries as you want, and multiple Disallow lines can apply to multiple user-agents, all in one entry. You can set the User-agent command to apply to all web crawlers by listing an asterisk (*) as in the example below:
More info about your situation:
Automatic translations don't always make sense and have the potential of being viewed as spam. Moreso, poor or artificial sounding translation can harm your site's perception. This image could help you chose a url structure that makes it easier to geotarget parts of your site to different regions. Here are your recommended options:
With that said, Google uses an algorithm to select a representative Url in a situation involving cross-domain canonical issues (more can be found here: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1716747?hl=en)
This is what Google has to say about Duplicate Content and International Sites:
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different
languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but
available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long
as the content is for different users in different countries. While we
strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different
group of users, we understand that this might not always be possible.
There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing
crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag.
However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on
different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/
show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a
preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element)
appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on
rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or
regional URL is served to searchers.
Source: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
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