301 Redirect & Canonical Tags
-
If I have URL A and need to 301 Redirect to URL B but want to have a canonical tag on URL B pointing to URL A Would this be considered cloaking? My server which runs .net 3.5 does not allow me to do URL re-writes.
-
Hello IMM,
When you are doing redirection of URL A to URL B so canonical tag is not very useful. Canonical tag we used so many duplicate pages is created dynamically & you can't all pages to redirect onto one main page.
You know that which page should be redirected then no use of canonical tag of URL A on URL B.
Just put URL B in canonical tag for MAIN PAGE.
-
Paul is right. Canonical is a hint, not a directive. Google will ignore hints when they don't make sense (i.e. a canonical to a 404).Cloaking is when you feed up one site to googlebot and another to real visitors. It can get you banned from Google's index. Canonicals cannot cloak anything.
-
In this instance, your canonical tag would make no sense, and so search engines would likely just ignore it.
If A were the canonical version, there would be no reason to be redirecting it to B.
I must be missing something here. What exactly is the end goal you're trying to accomplish, IMM?
Paul
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
How do I recover from a double 301 mistake?
We have a site that was ranking top 10 for 15 KW and top 20 for about 40. We decided to restructure the site to create silos. The old site used a plugin to create ".html" pages and the juice in Google was all on those pages. We asked our developer to eliminate the plugin / .html and forward the .html pages to our new structure. Instead, he took a shortcut and did a mass forward in code which resulted in all pages - such as "example.com/mypage.html" now forwarding to "example.com/mypage/" - He then did a 301 redirect from those pages with the "/" such as example.com/mypage/ to "example.com/my-new-page/". He did this for over 500 pages. To make matters worse, he mis-mapped about 100 pages and Google saw them as 404s, then in fixing those errors, new ones kept popping up. Those are now fixed. The net result is that we dropped like a stone on all of our rankings. Moving forward, do you think we can regain ground by manually doing 301s for the original .html pages to their new locations and eliminating the interim step? What would be your suggestions to recover as quickly as possible?
Moz Pro | | kramerico20 -
Do you get link equity from a redirect service?
When using a redirect service, do you get link equity from the redirect service or only from the linking website? Using opensite explorer in Moz, always shows me directory and redirect services as most important contribution for the domain authority. But I'm questioning if this is true. P.S. I'm not asking if link equity is passed from the linking website. That question has been answered many many many times. (hint: the answer is yes). H58xHAl.png pGH7e48.png
Moz Pro | | jasny0 -
How to choose the best canonical URL
In a duplicate content situation, and assuming that both rel=canonical and a 301 redirect pass link equity (I know there is still some speculation on this), how should you choose the "best" version of the URL to establish as the redirect target or authoritative URL? For example, we have a series of duplicate pages on our site. Typically we choose the "cleanest" or shortest non-trailing-slash version of the URL as the canonical, but what if those pages are already established and have varying page authority/backlink profiles? The URLs are: example.com/stores/locate/index?parameters=tags - PA = 54, Inbound Links = 259 example.com/stores/locate/index - PA = 60, Inbound Links = 302 example.com/stores/ - This is the version that currently ranks. PA = 42, Inbound Links = 3 example.com/stores - PA = 40, Inbound Links = 8 This might not really even matter, but in the interests of conserving as much SEO value as possible, which would you choose as either the 301 redirect target and/or the canonical version? My gut is to go with the URL that's already ranking (example.com/stores/) but curious if PA, backlinks, and trailing slashes should be considered also. We of course would not 301 the URL with the tracking parameters. 🙂 Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Critical_Mass0 -
Site Explorer shows links as followable but they have nofollow tags
Hello, I am looking at site explorer and sites linking to my site moneyfact.co.uk. I've got thousands of links showing as 'followable' but when i check them they have rel="nofollow" tags. e.g: http://www.dianomioffers.co.uk/partner/moneyfacts.co.uk/brochures.epl?partner=93&partner_id=93&partner_variant_id=33 Why would they show as followable when the links are nofollowed? Thanks Steve
Moz Pro | | SteveBrumpton0 -
In alt tag of a image can we use #hashtag or domain.com ? Is that good SEO or not allowed ?
Some of the Google Search shows a title has a hashtag of an article, which contain keyword and while tweeting them, the title which has a hashtag automatically very good used for getting traffic to the blog. And other one, can we use the hash tag inside the alt attribute ? Or our domain name with .com in it. Like Google.com or #Google ?
Moz Pro | | Esaky0 -
Why does Rel Canonical show up as a notice?
In the crawl diagnostics screen "Rel Canonical" shows up as a notice for every page that has a rel="canonical" meta tag in it. Why is this the case? Shouldn't every page have a canonical tag on it to show the absolute URL to the content? Wouldn't a better notice be to display pages that do not have a canonical tag instead? I could be wrong but that would make more sense to me. (In fact.. let's be honest here.. I probably am wrong.. but I'd like someone to explain it if they could.) Thanks
Moz Pro | | rrolfe1 -
Canonical URLs for Search Parameters
Hi Guys Our seomoz campaign report is returning a lot or Rel Canonical issues similar to this for each page. The non / version redirects to the / version but how do I get the ones with search parameters ie '?datefrom&nights' to redirect. http://www.lamangaclubresort.co.uk/accommodations/las-brisas-78
Moz Pro | | JohnTulley
http://www.lamangaclubresort.co.uk/accommodations/las-brisas-78/
http://www.lamangaclubresort.co.uk/accommodations/las-brisas-78/?datefrom&nights
http://www.lamangaclubresort.co.uk/accommodations/las-brisas-78/?datefrom=&nights= Any help would be welcome, thanks0 -
Crawl Diagnostics finding pages that dont exist. Will Rel Canon Help?
I have recently set up a campaign for www.completeoffice.co.uk. Im the in-house developer there. When the crawl diagnostics completed, i went to check the results, and to my surprise, it had well over 100 missing or empty title tags. I then clicked it to see what pages, and nearly all the pages it say have missing or empty title tags, DO NOT EXIST. This has really confused me and need help figuring out how to solve this. Can anyone help? Attached image is a screen shot of some of the links it showed me on crawl diagnostics, nearly all of these do not exist. Will the relation Canonical tag in the head section of the actual pages help? For example, The actual page that exist is: www.completeoffice.co.uk/Products.php Whereas, when crawled it actually showed www.completeoffice.co.uk/Products/Products.php Will have the rel can tag in the header of the real products.php solve this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0