Canonicalization interact with 301 redirects?
-
This is a interesting one I think.
I have recently taken down some product list pages from our website www.towelsrus.co.uk. These have canonicalisation in place to deal with pages where a query string is generated depending on the search criteria.
When I put a 301 redirect in place the target page redirects fine, however webmaster tools then errors with 404 on all canonicalised pages.
Is this correct behaviour and how do we get over this?
-
If I'm (we're) understanding your situation correctly, then I'd have to agree with Mike. You should 301-redirect all of the versions, not "chain" the canonical to a 301. That's going to produce very unpredictable results at best.
-
Just remember that a canonical is a signal not a directive. Google and other search engines can choose whether or not to listen to your signal. So make sure those "duplicate" pages need to exist as they are currently. In some cases it may make more sense to either update the page with fresh, original, and relevant content or to have the page marked NoIndex depending on the situation.
-
Thanks chaps. The other issue it also flags up is duplicate data as now no canonicalisation is in place. double whammy. I'll get the web company to allow us to update these for the future.
-
I'm not 100% sure why its throwing 404s because I've never had that exact problem when doing the same thing on any sites I work on but I agree with TextMarketing on updating the canonicals. If you originally had Page 1, Page 2, and Page 3 canonicalized to Page A and now Page A has been 301'd to Page B, you should update Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3 to have their canonical tags pointing to Page B instead of the 301 page.
-
If I'm understanding this right, you need to update your canonical tags with the pages the 301 is redirecting to.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 redirecting to anchor points
A client has just given me a list of redirect URLs as requested of them. However, they're wanting to redirect a bunch of pages to various anchor points within the same page. For example: /pages/about might redirect to: /pages/our-story#our-mission And: /pages/history might redirect to: /pages/our-story#history Is there any problem with this? I've never seen or been asked to redirect like this before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Is This 301 redirection correct??
Hello Everyone, I have Added This in .htaccess. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] ErrorDocument 404 /index.html Is this Correct ?? or need any change, please help, thanx in advace .0 -
Shall I use a 301 or 302 redirect when people leave the company?
Hello, At my company, we have instances where client-facing people leave the company and so we need to remove their profile page from the website. As opposed to people receiving a 404 when they search for them, I thought it would be best to divert visitors to a generic landing page to explain that the person they are looking for has left the company with details on how to get in touch. I'm tempted to use a 302 redirect so the person they are searching for stays in the search results longer. But longer-term, will this cause any harm? Should it be eventually be turned into a 301 redirect? Or should I just use a 301 in the first instance. Thanks in advance, Stu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stuart260 -
HTTPS Login on HTTP Site | 301 or 302 Redirect?
I've searched the forum on this and online and can't seem to find a definitive answer. Some e-commerce sites that are http use a 302 redirect to the https login while other sites use a 301 redirect. I know 302 is generally not recommended but in this case it may make sense. Can anyone advise on the correct practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CallMeNicholi0 -
URL Structure Change - 301 Redirect - on large website
Hi Guys, I have a website which has approximately 15 million pages indexed. We are planning to change url structure of 99.99% of pages but it would remain on same domain. eg: older url: xyz.com/nike-shoes; new url: xyx.com/shopping/nike-shoes A benefit that we would get is adding a related and important keyword in url. We also achieve other technical benefits in identifying the page type before hand and can reduce time taken to serve the pages (as per our tech team). For older URLs, we are planning to do a 301 redirect. While this seems to be the correct thing to do as per Google, we do see that there is a very large number of cases where people have suffered significantly on doing something like this : Here are our questions: Will all page rank value will be passed to new url? (i.e. will there be a 100% passing of PR/link juice to the new URLs) Can it lower my rank for keywords? (currently we have pretty good rankings (1-5) on many keywords) If there is an impact on rankings - will it be only on specific keywords or will we see a sitewide impact? Assuming that we have taken a hit on traffic, How much time would it take to get the traffic back to normal? and if traffic goes down, by what percentage it may go down and for how much time. (best case, average case and worst case scenarios) Is there anything I should keep in mind while doing this? I understand that there are no clear answers that can be given to these questions but we would like to evaluate a worst case/best case situation. Just to give context : Even a 10 day downtime in terms of drops in rankings is extremely detrimental for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Myntra0 -
301 redirect help
Hey guys, I normally work in WordPress and just use a 301 redirect plugin. I bought a site and rather than maintain two similar ones have decided to redirect one to the other. I am having trouble with the .htaccess file. Here is an example. These are two redirects: redirect 301 /category/models/next/2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster
redirect 301 /category/models I want both of these URLs to redirect to the same URL of the new site. However, the /category/models is the only one working. It redirects to the new page just fine. The /category/models/next/2 is redirecting to nearly the same URL on the new site, only it is adding /next/2 to the end and that is bringing up a 404. Why is it adding /next/2 to the new URL? How can I fix this? There are several doing this. Help appreciated!0 -
301 Redirect using rewrite rule in .htaccess
Hi guys, I have these types of URLs with the format below that are seen as duplicate contents http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=15&d=3&c=1 I wanted to permanently redirect them to my homepage. I am thinking if this is possible in .htaccess using rewrite conditions? Thanks in advance...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trigun0 -
302 redirect
Aloha, I do a small study of 302 redirects. I wonder if you have any examples of sites where the use of a 302 is made.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon
For example, to ski resorts: where there is a summer version and a winter version. In this case, the field of 302 will return the version of the relevant season. ex: http://www.valmorel.com/ >> 302 >> http://www.valmorel.com/fr/hiver/accueil-hiver.html I wonder if the use of 302 is the right solution.
What do you think? D.0