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:
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
-
Absolute vs. Relative Canonical Links
Hi Moz Community, I have a client using relative links for their canonicals (vs. absolute) Google appears to be following this just fine, but bing, etc. are still sending organic traffic to the non-canonical links. It's a drupal setup. Anyone have advice? Should I recommend that all canonical links be absolute? They are strapped for resources, so this would be a PITA if it won't make a difference. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch1 -
GWT does not play nice with 410 status code approach to expire content? Use 301s?
We have been diligently managing our index size in Google for our sites and are returning a 410 status code for pages that we no longer consider "up-to-date" but still carry value for users to access to have Google remove them from our index to keep it lean. However we have been receiving GWT warning across sites because of the 410 status codes Google is encountering which makes us nervous that Google could interpret this approach as a lack of quality of our site. Does anyone have a view if the 410 approach is the right approach for the given example or if we should consider maybe simply using 301s or another status code to keep our GWT errors clean? Further notes there is hardly ever any link juice being sent to those pages so it is not like we are missing out on that the pages for which we return 410 are also marked as noindex and nofollow
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petersocapro0 -
Google Indexing Duplicate URLs : Ignoring Robots & Canonical Tags
Hi Moz Community, We have the following robots command that should prevent URLs with tracking parameters being indexed. Disallow: /*? We have noticed google has started indexing pages that are using tracking parameters. Example below. http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/original-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table/1149.html http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/original-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table/1149.html?ec=affee77a60fe4867 These pages are identified as duplicate content yet have the correct canonical tags: https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oakfurnitureland.co.uk%2Ffurniture%2Foriginal-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table%2F1149.html&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oakfurnitureland.co.uk%2Ffurniture%2Foriginal-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table%2F1149.html&gs_l=hp.3..0i10j0l9.4201.5461.0.5879.8.8.0.0.0.0.82.376.7.7.0....0...1c.1.58.hp..3.5.268.0.JTW91YEkjh4 With various affiliate feeds available for our site, we effectively have duplicate versions of every page due to the tracking query that Google seems to be willing to index, ignoring both robots rules & canonical tags. Can anyone shed any light onto the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBGlobalSEO0 -
Transferring link juice from a canonical URL to an SEO landing page.
I have URLs that I use for SEM ads in Google. The content on those pages is duplicate (affiliate). Those pages also have dynamic parameters which caused lots of duplicate content pages to be indexed. I have put a canonical tag on the Parameter pages to consolidate everything to the canonical URL. Both the canonical URL and the Parameter URLs have links pointing to them. So as it stands now, my canonical URL is still indexed, but the parameter URLs are not. The canonical page is still made up of affiliate (duplicate) content though. I want to create an equivalent SEO landing page with unique content. But I'd like to do two things 1) remove the canonical URL from the index - due to duplicate affiliate content, and 2) transfer the link juice from the canonical URL over to the SEO URL. I'm thinking of adding a meta NoIndex, follow tag to the canonical tag - and internally linking to the new SEO landing page. Does this strategy work? I don't want to lose the link juice on the canonical URL by adding a meta noindex tag to it. Thanks in advance for your advice. Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf0 -
Use of Rel=Canonical
I have been pondering whether I am using this tag correctly or not. We have a custom solution which lays out products in the typical eCommerce style with plenty of tick box filters to further narrow down the view. When I last researched this it seemed like a good idea to implement rel=canonical to point all sub section pages at a 'view-all' page which returns all the products unfiltered for that given section. Normally pages are restricted down to 9 results per page with interface options to increase that. This combined with all the filters we offer creates many millions of possible page permutations and hence the need for the Canonical tag. I am concerned because our view-all pages get large, returning all of that section's product into one place.If I pointed the view-all page at say the first page of x results would that defeat the object of the view-all suggestion that Google made a few years back as it would require further crawling to get at all the data? Alternatively as these pages are just product listings, would NoIndex be a better route to go given that its unlikely they will get much love in Google anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | motiv80 -
Is it ok to add rel=CANONICAL into the desktop version on top of the rel="alternate" Tag (Mobile vs Desktop version)
Hi mozzers, We launched a mobile site a couples months ago following the parallel mobile structure with a URL:m.example.com The week later my moz crawl detected thousands of dups which I resolved by implementing canonical tags on the mobile version and rel=alternate onto the desktop version. The problem here is that I still also got Dups from that got generated by the CMS. ?device=mobile ?device=desktop One of the options to resolve those is to add canonicals on the desktop versions as well on top of the rel=alternate tag we just implemented. So my question here: is it dangerous to add rel=canonical and rel=alternate tags on the desktop version of the site or not? will it disrupt the rel=canonical on mobile? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Alternative to rel canonical?
Hello there, we have a problem. Let's say we have a website www.mainwebsite.com Then you have 40 websites like this: www.retailer1.mainwebsite.com www.retailer2.mainwebsite.com www.retailer3.mainwebsite.com www.retailer4.mainwebsite.com www.retailer5.mainwebsite.com www.retailer6.mainwebsite.com … an so on In order to avoid the duplicate content penalty from Google we've added a rel="canonical" in each 40 sub-websites mapping each page of them to www.mainwebsite.com Our issue is that now, all our retailers (each owner of www.retailer-X.mainwebsite.com) are complaining about the fact that they are disappeared from Google. How can we avoid to use rel="canonical" in the sub-website and not being penalised by Google for duplicate content in www.mainwebsite.com? Many thanks, all your advices are much appreciated. YESdesign team
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YESdesign0 -
Will the Canonical tag fix this issue?
I recently joined promoz and I've been busy working through the issues raised brought to light during the crawls of our Magento site, www.unitedbmwonline.com. One of many issues were the 10,000+ Duplicate Page Titles which I believe are the result of not using Canonical tags when setting up the store. This is now corrected and hopefully I'll see a significant drop in this value after this next crawl. Am I correct in this assumption? Cheers, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire0