Hello guys, i have a blog https://devswisdom.com/ whenever i create a post on my blog i repost it here and add the canonical URL pointing to the original content so google knows that which page is original and to only index that page and not the post which is here.
But all my reposts are getting indexed on google in spite of added canonical tags, here is an example.
If you type "AWS Artifact" on Google, you will see my post on Dev.to
https://dev.to/shivangchauhan7/what-is-aws-artifact-2641
But canonical tag is added on this post and it should not show up on google, the original post is here
https://devswisdom.com/what-is-aws-artifact/
Please help me with this, admins/moderators.
Top comments (6)
That isn't how canonical tags work.
They are an indicator to Google that a page is the original / the page to reference, not necessarily that they must index the canonical page and show it first.
As DEV has a much higher Domain Authority than your site Google has chosen to show results from this page.
Also the DEV site loads way faster than yours and so performs much better in Core Web Vitals, so that is another major factor in why Google shows DEV rather than your site.
There are ways you can reduce the chances of this happening, but they don't always work.
The simplest is to post to your blog first, wait a week and then publish on DEV.
Assuming that your page gets indexed within that week then you will likely get a higher ranking. But yet again this isn't guaranteed as there are hundreds of factors that determine ranking.
The good news is that although DEV may get the Google positions you will get most if not all of the link juice if people link to the article on DEV etc. So it still benefits you from an SEO perspective.
Additionally it makes sure you don't get the opposite problem, your content is not marked as duplicate and penalised, canonicals make sure that doesn't happen!
Thank you so much for the response, you are absolutely right, i had a talk with one SEO expert today they have suggested the same thing, to wait for my original content to be publicly shown in the google results by serching this query in google search - "site: (url of the new post)".
If the page is there then it means that google is listing that page successfully, this can also be verified from Google Search Console.
So after original content is indexed then i should do cross posting with canonical tag.
He also suggested to wait for 3 months or something and maybe later on google will rank my post higher than the cross posted version because adjusting the page in search results can take time so google may decide to rank the cross posted version below the original post because of the canonical tag after couple of months.
The longer you wait the greater chance, but don't underestimate the benefits of syndication.
Waiting 3 months to cross post something is only going to add a tiny chance that it outranks the original due to the factors I mentioned earlier. Once Google has indexed it it knows your content was there first, what Google does after that nobody knows!
Don't worry, the traffic will come on your site, for now you just want eyeballs on your work so people start recognising your name etc. Then they will search you out or stumble across your blog and subscribe there. 👍
Yes, i meant waiting 3 months for the already cross posted content to rank below the original content, i think what i'm gonna do now is instead of cross posting same content, i will create seperate content for DEV and my blog and then link some of my blog content under/inside the DEV post.
So instead of cross posting, i will do guest blogging, that way there will be no issue of my main blog content ranking lower than DEV reposted content and also there will be no need to add canonical url to my blog.
Putting this out here as it may help someone :)