Rel=Canonical on a page with 302 redirection existing
-
Hi SEOMoz!
Can I have the rel=canonical tag on a URL page that has a 302 redirection? Does this harm the search engine friendliness of a content page / website?
Thanks!
Steve
-
Thanks for help confirming that I have the right compromise solution Dr. Pete! Yep, I am going to that as well on GWT. Only problem is that it takes those dev's months to put in the html file so I could verify it.
-
Oh, sorry, it's a session ID, not a tracking/affiliate sort of ID. Honestly, the best solution is to avoid URL-based session IDs entirely, and store it in a cookie or session variable, but yeah, I realize that's not always feasible.
In this case, the 302-redirect should help keep link-juice at the root URL, and is probably a good bet. I think adding the canonical tag to the parameterized versions is a good backup, though. You could also block that parameter in Google Webmaster Tools, since it really has no search value at all.
-
Hi Dr. Pete!
Sorry to confuse everyone but it is actually like this:
{What is happening right now}
(1) www.example.com > 302 redirects to > www.example.com?id=12345
{What I think I could recommend as a solution}
(2) What I intend to do is put rel=canonical on www.example.com as the developers from the client side says it is not technically feasible on their platform to remove the session id on the home page url.
-
So, it's something like this?
(1) canonical to -> www.example.com
(2) 302-redirect to -> www.example.com
Is the 302 intended so that visitors don't bookmark the ID'ed version? The problem is that the 302 is essentially telling Google to leave link-juice at the ID'ed URL, while the canonical is telling Google to consolidate link-juice to the root URL. I think I get your intent, but it's a mixed signal to the search engines. In this case, I do think that a 301 is the way to go, unless I'm misunderstanding.
-
Hi AnkitMaheshwari,
Reason why there's a 302 in the home page URL because the website appends session id's. The best compromise I could think of is to implement a rel=canonical on the home page URL minus the session id i.e. www.website.com
-
If you want your page to be search engine friendly you have only two options:
1. Change 302 redirect to 301 redirect and pointing it to the correct page.
2. If 301 is not possible then remove the 302 redirect and just keep canonical tag pointing to the correct page
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
-
Ranking for non-existing content which is 301 redirected
Hey there, In the beginning of this year I've made complete site migration from Dutch language to English. All the old Dutch URL's were 301 redirected to the English versions. I naturally lost rankings for all Dutch keywords during the next month. On the website there is no Dutch content anymore. But what happened now is that five months later the website started to rank for the Dutch keywords again. The page snippets in SERP are in English but the URL's shown are in Dutch (ending with .nl) and whenever a user clicks on the snippet he/she gets 301 to the correct English version. Any ideas what could be the reason for re-ranking of non-existing pages which gets 301 in SERP?
Technical SEO | | benesmartin0 -
Please let me know if I am in a right direction with fixing rel="canonical" issue?
While doing my website crawl, I keep getting the message that I have tons of duplicated pages.
Technical SEO | | kirupa
http://example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php are considered to be the duplicates. As I figured out this one: http://example.com/index.php is a canonical page, and I should point out this one: http://www.example.com/index.php to it. Could you please let me know if I will do a right thing if I put this piece of code into my index.php file?
? Or I should use this one:0 -
302 redirected links not found
There are so many 302 redirected links you found among which most are for the pages which needs users to login to view the pages so redirection to login page is unavoidable. For example: https://www.stopwobble.com/wishlist/index/add/product/98199/form_key/QE0kEzOF2yO3DTtt/ Also we don't have product compare functionlity, but still there are so many links from compare page which redirects to respective category page. For exammple: http://www.stopwobble.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/98199/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zdG9wd29iYmxlLmNvbS93b2JibGUtd2VkZ2Vz/form_key/QE0kEzOF2yO3DTtt/ We need to know from where Moz crawler is detecting these links so that we can supress them from being crawled. I already tries to review overall site and confirmed these links nowhere exists in page source or in sitemap.xml
Technical SEO | | torbett0 -
How do I redirect the Author archive page in Wordpress?
If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog. I would like to redirect the author page to my "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress. Anyone know how I can do this?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
Rel=canonical - Identical .com and .us Version of Site
We have a .us and a .com version of our site that we direct customers to based on location to servers. This is not changing for the foreseeable future. We had restricted Google from crawling the .us version of the site and all was fine until I started to see the https version of the .us appearing in the SERPs for certain keywords we keep an eye on. The .com still exists and is sometimes directly above or under the .us. It is occasionally a different page on the site with similar content to the query, or sometimes it just returns the exact same page for both the .com and the .us results. This has me worried about duplicate content issues. The question(s): Should I just get the https version of the .us to not be crawled/indexed and leave it at that or should I work to get a rel=canonical set up for the entire .us to .com (making the .com the canonical version)? Are there any major pitfalls I should be aware of in regards to the rel=canonical across the entire domain (both the .us and .com are identical and these newly crawled/indexed .us pages rank pretty nicely sometimes)? Am I better off just correcting it so the .us is no longer crawled and indexed and leaving it at that? Side question: Have any ecommerce guys noticed that Googlebot has started to crawl/index and serve up https version of your URLs in the SERPs even if the only way to get into those versions of the pages are to either append the https:// yourself to the URL or to go through a sign in or check out page? Is Google, in the wake of their https everywhere and potentially making it a ranking signal, forcing the check for the https of any given URL and choosing to index that? I just can't figure out how it is even finding those URLs to index if it isn't seeing http://www.example.com and then adding the https:// itself and checking... Help/insight on either point would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TLM0 -
Is a Rel="cacnonical" page bad for a google xml sitemap
Back in March 2011 this conversation happened. Rand: You don't want rel=canonicals. Duane: Only end state URL. That's the only thing I want in a sitemap.xml. We have a very tight threshold on how clean your sitemap needs to be. When people are learning about how to build sitemaps, it's really critical that they understand that this isn't something that you do once and forget about. This is an ongoing maintenance item, and it has a big impact on how Bing views your website. What we want is end state URLs and we want hyper-clean. We want only a couple of percentage points of error. Is this the same with Google?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Rel=Canonical Header Location
Hello, I've been trying to get our rel=canonical issues sorted out. A fellow named Ayaz very kindly pointed out that I'm trying to put the code into the wysisyg editor, but this might not be the best place to put the code. We are using Drupal 6. Where do I insert the code? head> <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/my-awesome-blog-post"> Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Canonical tag used on several pages?
Is it a bad idea to use rel=canonical from several pages back to one (if you are planning on no-indexing them)? Does this concentrate the “link juice” from those several pages back to one?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0