URL for offline purposes
-
Hi there,
We are going to be promoting one of our products offline, however I do not want to use the original URL for this product page as it's long for the user to type in, so I thought it would be best practice in using a URL that would be short, easier for the consumer to remember.
My plan:
Replicate the product page and put it on this new short URL, however this would mean I have a duplicate content issue, would It be best practice to use a canonical on the new short URL pointing to the original URL? or use a 301?
Thanks for any help
-
I agree with Matt - as long as your primary, internal links are consistent, it's ok to use a short version for offline purposes. The canonical tag is perfectly appropriate for this.
The other option would be to use a third-party shortener that has built-in tracking, like Bit.ly. It uses a 301-redirect, but also captures the data. If you're just doing a test case, this might be easier all-around.
-
Well I am assuming all your sites internal links are already pointing to the original product page, so in relation to this, as long as you don't create any internal links pointing to your duplicate friendly URL for offline you will be fine and implementing it as DR Pete instructs. Canonical links should be on all pages that are duplicates of the target page which is part of the canonical tag.
-
I read this in Dr.Pete's article in seomoz
Know Your Crawl Paths
Finally, an important reminder – the most important canonical signal is usually your internal links. If you use the canonical tag to point to one version of a URL, but then every internal link uses a different version, you’re sending a mixed signal and using the tag as a band-aid. The canonical URL should actually becanonical in practice – use it consistently. If you’re an outside SEO coming into a new site, make sure you understand the crawl paths first, before you go and add a bunch of tags. Don’t create a mess on top of a mess.
Would this cause me an issue using the method I have used?
Also should I use a canonical on the original URL pointing to itself?
Thanks
-
I don't think you need to remove this Gary if that is the case - take a look here for an updated 2012 article on rel="canonical" from the horses mouth
- http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
This might help you.
-
H,
IMO you can simply disallow the URL with robots.txt. There is no other alternative for this.
Regards,
-
Hi Matt,
I really do not want to create a 301, as I want to see stats in Analytics for this short URL.
I have actually used a canonical, do you recommend removing this and using disallow in robots.txt?
Thanks.
-
I would create a 301 redirect from your new short URL to your original product page as you are essentially just creating a new path to it and not new content.
Here is a post about canonicalisation from Matt Cutts - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
And another useful insight from SEOMoz on how to deal with duplicate content - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
Hope this helps
Blurbpoint is also correct using his method will also work - blocking the page in a robots.txt file or using the meta-tags no index, no follow will also stop duplicate content issues! The down side is that any links that your short URL acquires will not pass any link juice unlike with 301s or canonicalization.
-
By using canonical tag we can tell Google, which is the original version of page. Dr pete has written nice post on it few days back.
Here is the URL: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-page-is-canonical
Hope this will solve your concern.
-
Hi there,
I have just read this post:
What is the purpose of the canonical tag in this instance if you can you block that URL in robots.txt?
Thanks
-
If you are thinking of promoting that product offline, you can block that page in your robots.txt file or alternatively you can also put noindex, nofollow robot tag in that page. Search engine will not going to index that page as its blocked for all bots so no duplicate content issue will arise.
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
-
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Changing URLs from sentence case to lower case
Hi Guys, We are contemplating of changing our site URL structure from sentence case to all lowercase. www.example.com/All-Products/Bedroom-Furniture/ www.example.com/all-products/bedroom-furniture/ We will use 301 redirect for old to new. Its a 3 year old ecommerce site and currently rank very decent on serps. The agency that does our seo is recommending this change and reckons that all lowecase URLs as preferred over our current URL structure. My worry is we will lose our current ranking but agency advises that rankings will probably go lower or fluctuate for some time and get back to its original position or may even rank better in due course as we are doing a 301 redirect and once the site is crawled Google will know the change. We are approaching Christmas and thenext 2 months are most busiest period of the year, we don't want to risk on traffic. I would really appreciate if the community experts can advise, Is it really that lowercase URLs are better than our current url structure? By doing 301 will our rankings come back to same in "due course" ? How much of a risk is it to do these changes at this time of the year? Thanking you in advance, Sohail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tigersohelll1 -
Redirect to url with parameter
I have a wiki (wiki 1) where many of the pages are well index in google. Because of a product change I had to create a new wiki (wiki 2) for the new version of my product. Now that most of my customers are using the new version of my product I like to redirect the user from wiki 1 to wiki 2. An example of a redirect could be from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen. Because of a technical issue the url I redirect to, needs to have a parameter like "?" so the example will be wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? Will the search engines see it as I have two pages with same content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Debitoor
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen
and
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? And will the SEO juice from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen be transfered to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen?0 -
How careful do you need to be about changes to readable URLs?
We are moving to Sitecore where the standard out the box is that if you change page title it amends the URL as well. I am worried that this will lead to SEO issues and am considering whether we need to get it locked down so that if the page title is amended (only in a minor way) it does not also change the URL. I have never worked with readable URLs before - what are the implications of the URL not exactly matching the wording of the page title?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alzheimerssoc0 -
One site two languages - what to do with urls?
Hi, We are working with a client who has a Spanish site which is in English and Spanish, what is the best url structure to go for? www.domain.es and en.domain.es or www.domain.es and www.domain.es/en or none of the above?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
How much is the effect of redirecting an old URL to another URL under a new domain?
Example: http://www.olddomain.com/buy/product-type/region/city/area http://www.newdomain.com/product-type-for-sale/city/area Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow20130 -
URL tracking on offline material
Hi there, Hope someone can give some advice. We are doing some magazine advertising, the main purpose of the advert is to promote one of our new products, however the URL goes something like this: http://www.domain.com/products/new-product-libra-furniture/ which is just too long for anyone to remember, I think it should be simply domain.com/libra which redirects to the product page, however how can I track this in Google Analytics? if using a 301 that's impossible? Any advice would be grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Sub Domains vs. Persistent URLs
I've always been under the assumption that when building a micro-site it was better to use a true path (e.g. yourcompany.com/microsite) URL as opposed to a sub domain (microsite.yourcompany.com) from an SEO perspective. Can you still generate significant SEO gains from a sub domain if you were forced to use it providing the primary (e.g. yourcompany.com) had a lot of link clout/authority? Meaning, if I had to go the sub domain route would it be the end of the world?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VERBInteractive0