301s Or Stick With Canonical?
-
Hello all! A nice interesting one for you on this fine Friday...
I have some pages which are accessible by 2 different urls - This is for user experience allowing the user to get to these pages in two different ways. To keep Google happy we have a rel canonical so that Google only sees one of these urls to avoid duplicates.
After some SEO work I need to change both of these urls (on around 1,000 pages). Is the best way to do this...
To 301 every old url to every new url
Or... To not worry as I will just point the indexed pages to the new rel canonical?
Any ideas or suggestions would be brilliant.
Thanks!
-
You got it!
-
I agree with Calin. Just a canonical would not be ideal because Google is not good at removing things from the index without a redirect or an explicit request in Webmaster Tools. Canonicals don't stack up in this regard.
-
Hi Calin,
Thank you very much for your response. Just to confirm I am understanding you correctly, you are suggesting
the following approach:1. Do a 301 Redirect on both old and currently indexed URLs
- www.example.com/tennis-shoes [currently canonicalised to www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2]
- www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2
To
www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2 [The URL we want google to index]
2. www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes [canonicalise to www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2]
The second step will prevent any duplicate content issues given the content will still be accessible
from this URL as well [www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes]Finally it shouldn't be a problem to have a canonical tag on the www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2
to itself as we might need just in case the URL is accessed say using a query string (www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2?type=sports)?Once again, thank you for taking your time to reply.
-
Hi Harry,
If I'm understanding your question, both the 301 and the rel=canonical would technically be correct.
However, if I were in your position and had two old URLs, let's call them:
And, I was changing my URL structure to:
I would implement a 301 redirect for the two old pages to the new page (the one that doesn't have the rel=canonical applied). Assuming of course you don't have website restrictions that would make the update problematic. Then add the rel=canonical tag to the duplicate page as you did before.
Moz has some really great resources as well that you can check out:
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
-
301s being indexed
A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Is it a problem that Google's index shows paginated page urls, even with canonical tags in place?
Since Google shows more pages indexed than makes sense, I used Google's API and some other means to get everything Google has in its index for a site I'm working on. The results bring up a couple of oddities. It shows a lot of urls to the same page, but with different tracking code.The url with tracking code always follows a question mark and could look like: http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example http://www.MozExampleURL.com?another-tracking-examle http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example-3 etc So, the only thing that distinguishes one url from the next is a tracking url. On these pages, canonical tags are in place as: <link rel="canonical<a class="attribute-value">l</a>" href="http://www.MozExampleURL.com" /> So, why does the index have urls that are only different in terms of tracking urls? I would think it would ignore everything, starting with the question mark. The index also shows paginated pages. I would think it should show the one canonical url and leave it at that. Is this a problem about which something should be done? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Dealing with non-canonical http vs https?
We're working on a complete rebuild of a client's site. The existing version of the site is in WordPress and I've noticed that the site is accessible via http and https. The new version of the site will have mostly or entirely different URLs. It seems that both http and https versions of a page will resolve, but all of the rel-canonical tags I've seen point to the https version. Sometimes image tags and stylesheets are https, sometimes they aren't. There are both http and https pages in Google's index. Having looked at other community posts about http/https, I've gathered the following: http/https is like two different domains. http and https versions need to be verified in Google Webmaster Tools separately. Set up the preferred domain properly. Rel-canonicals and internal links should have matching protocols. My thought is that we will do a .htaccess that redirects old URLs regardless of the protocol to new pages at one protocol. I would probably let the .css and image files from the current site 404. When we develop and launch the new site, does it make sense for everything to be forced to https? Are there any particular SEO issues that I should be aware of for a scenario like this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GOODSIR0 -
Rel=Canonical=CONFUSED
Hey, I am a confused canonical and here's why - please help! I have a master website called www.1099pro.com and then many other websites that simply duplicate the material on the master site (i.e www.1099A.com, www.1099T.com, www.1099solution.com, and the list goes on). These other domains & pages have been around for long enough that they have been able to garner some page authority & domain authority that it makes it worthwhile to redirect them to their corresponding pages on www.1099pro.com. The problem is two-fold when trying to pass this link-juice: I do not have access to the web-service that hosts the other sites/domains and cannot 301 redirect them The other sites/domains are setup so that whatever changes I make to www.1099pro.com are automatically distributed across all the other sites. This means that when I put on www.1099pro.com it also shows up on all the other domains. It is my understanding that having on a site such as www.1099solution.com does not pass any link juice and actually eliminates that page from the search results. Is there any way that I can pass the link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Rel=canonical on image pages
Hi, Im working on a Wordpress hosted blog site. I recently did a "site:search" in Google for a specific article page to make sure it was getting crawled, and it returned three separate URLs in the search results. One was the article page, and the other two were the URLs that hosted the images that are found in the article. Would you suggest adding the rel=canonical tag to the pages that host the images so they point back to the actual context article page? Or are they fine being left alone? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
IP address being indexed by Google in addition to canonical domain.
Our site's IP address is being indexed in addition to the canonical www.example.com domain. As soon as it was flagged a 301 was implemented in the .htaccess file to redirect the IP address to the canonical. Does this usually occur? Is it detrimental to SEO? In my time in SEO I've never heard of this being an issue, or being part of a list of things to be checked. It sounds more like a server that wasn't configured correctly when hosting was set up? It didn't seem to be affecting the site at all, but is it more common and I've just never heard of it? 😛 Should it be something I'm usually looking for in future? Responses are greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mikeimrie0 -
Rel=Canonical URLs?
If I had two pages: PageA about Cats PageB about Dogs If PageA had a link rel=canonical to PageB, but the content is different, how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?" If PageA 301 redirected to PageB, (no content in PageA since it's 301 redirected), how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | visionnexus0