Canonical redirects
-
Hello,
I have a quick question: I use wordpress for my website. I have a plugin for translating the website in other languages. Thus, I have 2 versions of urls, one with /en, one without (original languale). This has been seen as duplicate content.
I have been advised that the best to do is to use canonical redirect. Should I use it on the general header.php (the only header I can find in the CMS), or should I redirect each page singularly? I believe the second is the best way, but I can't find headers and txt documents for each page in my FTP.
As well I have seen this post, in which is explained that canonical redirects can be done directly in the general header.php http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2009/02/avoid-duplicate-content-use-canonical-url-in-wordpress-fix-plugin/
Is it true? You have any suggestion?
Thanks!Eugenio
-
Thank you Adam,
Very good answer, thats what I needed
Please let me know if I understood good:
Should I replace the /contact.php in the example to my real address /en/contact?
And basically I should put the below condition. Should I write this code for each url i want to redirect? so that it would be like
if /en/contact, then rel="canonical" /contact
else /contact
if /en/about-us, then rel="canonical" /about-us
else /about-us
etc?
-
Since you are using wordpress you won't have individual pages in your FTP. The only way you could edit something into the individual pages would be each posts edit page on the CMS. However, I don't know if doing that would work since its technically beneath the head.
And yes the canonical redirect can be done in the general header, although personally I would load it as a php IF criteria. In other words you add it to the general header but tell it only to load that if i t is on one of these /en pages. That way you don't have the canonical applied to other pages you actually want, or the main page that it is directing too as that would cause an odd loop for the spiders that I doubt they would respond positively too.
Here you can find a quick sample of working with the PHP if page criteria: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7997016/if-this-page-show-this-else-show-this
Good luck!
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
-
Rel Canonicals not working properly.
We recently implemented rel=canonicals on a few of our pages to prevent query parameters from showing up in the SERPs. The two pages we added the tags to are no longer ranking. The pages used to rank very well for branded terms such as "morningstar direct" and "morningstar sustainability", but now don't show up at all. When you search for the urls specifically, for example "products/direct morningstar" the query parameter is still indexing. Does anyone know why this might be or what we can do to fix this issue? The two pages are www.morningstar.com/products/direct and https://www.morningstar.com/company/sustainability
Technical SEO | | jmigdal0 -
301 redirects
Hello. Our site was recently rebuilt, and we switched from using index.php in all the urls to not using it at all. We also changed the names of many of our pages. So the urls have been renamed from "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/". While we were at it, we changed from "_" to "-" as our word separators in the urls. In the .htaccess file, we have a small block of code that strips out "index.php/" from all requests. This code redirects a request for "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/old_page_name/" For your information, the code that strips out "index.php/" is: RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.index.php [NC]
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/uSZWTLna/.
RewriteRule (.?)index.php/(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L] Then we have 301 redirects from "example.com/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/" QUESTION 1: Is this two-step redirect approach okay, or would it be better to skip the separate index.php stripping code and simply have 301 redirects that include "index.php" in the urls? QUESTION 2: Will we lose some of the benefit of the links that have to pass through a 301 redirect? QUESTION 3: We have 50 or so redirects. Will this affect performance of the site? How many redirects does it take to start affecting performance? Thank you!0 -
302 Redirect from HTTP to HTTPS
Hi Guys One of our client's website is having 586 linking unique domains to http://www.XYZ.com.au (to home page only). They have migrated their site to https://www.XYZ.com.au so all of their site pages are on HTTPS now instead of HTTP. The HTTP version of the home page is 302 redirected to HTTPS therefore we think they are not getting all the link juice of 586 linking domains and would like to recommend to change their 302 to 301. However we have not seen any ranking drop due to this migration and redirect in place. The new HTTPS site/redirect is live from last 2 months now. So not sure its worth recommending 301 or not? Does this mean Google is picking up this 302 redirect as normal and attributing all link value to HTTPS version? Please can anyone share their thoughts on recent Google interpretation of 302 from HTTP to HTTPS? Thanks
Technical SEO | | JamesDixon700 -
Redirects
I have a question about 404ed domains and old domains. #1 A domain has many links to it, but has been 404ed for 4 months. Should I redirect to a page I own and is almost exactly the same content. Will the fact that it was once 404ed be an issue? #2 I have an old domain that has many links but has been stagnant for a long time. Are these links still valuable and I should I redirect them to an important page on a different site? Does penguin influence your advice?
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
301 redirects
At the moment it's possible to access the home page of my website via two different urls, with and without www. and you've told me that this can be resolved with Canonicalization and a 301 redirect. Do I do this with my web hosting package or in my html pages? If I can't do it with my web host (1&1) then is there an idiot's guide of how to do it yourself? I've also got both the domain vamospaella.co.uk and vamospaella.com. Is it better to have one of these redirecting to the other for UK traffic (at the moment .co.uk redirects to .com) Thanks
Technical SEO | | melissa10 -
Joomla 301 redirects
hi i am using joomla sef404 and i have 7000 not found pages in my webmaster google tool page. the trouble is i got rid of a lot of pages and also components so now i am left with loads of not found pages. what i want to try and do is to create 301 redirects so that i do not lose page rank. can anyone please let me know how to do this step by step please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Effect of rel canonical on links
Has anyone done any experimentation on how Google treats links that are on a page that is being "rel canonical'd" to another page? For eg, example.com/b has a canonical pointing to example.com/a How does Google treat the internal links that are on page example.com/b?
Technical SEO | | Burgo0 -
301 redirect on the root of the site
Due to some historic difficulties with our URL Rewriter, we are in the position of having the root of our site 301 redirected to another page. So the root of our site: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/ has a 301 redirect to: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/home.aspx We're aware that this isn't great and we're working to fix this completely, but what impact will this have on our SEO?
Technical SEO | | LianWard860