Redirect 301 or Canonical.
-
Hello all,
I have a page with a long post title and url path name (more than 70 caracters and 115). This page has many visits but I am changing the SEO website structure according to SEOMOz and forums guidelines so: I WILL CREATE A DUPLICATE PAGE WITH THE SAME INFO.
This issue has been marked as an issue in the SEO tools, for long names>70 and url path names>115
My question is which option should I use and you would recommend me?
1. OPTION 1: Ideally I would like to keep the old post, so I should use the canonical tag, but my main concern is if the search engines in terms of SEO, even the canonical has been done, will penalise my SEO as there is still a post with bad SEO optimising, or if this is not the case because I already used the canonical.
2. OPTION 2: Eliminate the post and redirection 301 to the new page to keep the juice.
I would prefer option 1, as I keep both post and page, but only if searchengines do not penalise my SEO as they detect a long post name and url path name.
Thank you verty much,
Antonio
-
No problem Antonio,
Your question in regard earning potential - you are looking an impression model from what you have said - so that all depends on the amount of pageviews you get as this sort of advertising measures CPM cost per thousand impressions.
It also depends on what ad network you choose or whether you are going to try and sell your ad space yourself. CPM Ad Networks have different requirements to sign up with them and they all pay differently.
http://www.earningguys.com/advertisement/15-best-cost-per-impression-cpm-ads-networks/
This article gives some well known CPM Ad Networks that you might want to look into or possibly contact to get an idea about what your site could earn. If you could get an average CPM rate that they pay then you could easily estimate your sites potential income.
What is the engagement like on your site?
-
Thank you Matt, it does make sense!
Matt, I have another question from a different topic that you may help,
Do you have an idea where I can get a website/traffic income estimator according to the page views & unique users in terms of ads-platforms? I mean strictly due to ads prints.
It is just to have a rough idea of what could be the income of a website with 5000 unique visitors per day (assuming no product/service is sold).
In any case thank you very much for the great info provided,
Antonio
-
That is why for peace of mind I would go for a 301 redirect which will pass the majority of link juice in terms of SEO and it will eliminate the old page pointing straight at the new one and telling search engines that your old page has permanently moved to the new URL.
Once search engines catch up they will only index your new page URL and Title which you have optimised eliminating the old unfriendly ones but passing any link juice they have gained at the same time.
Does this make sense?
-
Thank you Matt for the great help,
Yes, I will create a page exactly with the same content than the old post, but with right title and url path names according to best SEO practices.
Matt, what I do not still understand is, if I use the canonical, the content will be still in a post (no good SEO) and in a page (good SEO) but my main concern is if the old post that still exists will penalise my SEO overall as the post is not properly in terms of lengths for names and urls.
Thank you very much Matt!
Antonio
-
If you have used a canonical tag to point to the best version of your page then there shouldn't be an issue in terms of SEO and search engines as you are actually telling the search engine that you have two pages that contain the same information and you would like them to take the one mentioned in the canonical tag as the original. You are actually practising good optimisation and that is the whole reason the canonical tag was introduced to help optimise website structure for search engines.
A quick question - when you create this new page that will have a different URL and Title are you going to be keeping the rest of the content the same? If so I would personally use a 301 redirect to the new URL and make sure that you have changed any internal links such as navigation to the new URL and not the old one. When I have had a situation such as this that is what I have done and it has worked well. It is important when changing your site structure and URLs that you make sure your navigation reflects your new URLs and not the old redirected ones, so you don't give mixed messages to the search engines.
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
-
Redirect Chains
Hi There, I have had conducted a few migrations recently and have a common issue which is this: HTTP (old site) -> HTTPS (old site) -> (HTTPS) (new site) Which causes a redirect chain. How should you prevent this before migration or fix it after migration? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
301 redirection help needed!
Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley3 -
How to handle potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following a major site replacement
We are looking for the very best way of handling potentially thousands (50k+) of 301 redirects following
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
a major site replacement and I mean total replacement. Things you should know
Existing domain has 17 years history with Google but rankings have suffered over the past year and yes we know why. (and the bitch is we paid a good sized SEO company for that ineffective and destructive work)
The URL structure of the new site is completely different and SEO friendly URL's rule. This means that there will be many thousands of historical URL's (mainly dynamic ones) that will attract 404 errors as they will not exist anymore. Most are product profile pages and the God Google has indexed them all. There are also many links to them out there.
The new site is fully SEO optimised and is passing all tests so far - however there is a way to go yet. So here are my thoughts on the possible ways of meeting our need,
1: Create 301 redirects for each an every page in the .htaccess file that would be one huge .htaccess file 50,000 lines plus - I am worried about effect on site speed.
2: Create 301 redirects for each and every unused folder, and wildcard the file names, this would be a single redirect for each file in each folder to a single redirect page
so the 404 issue is overcome but the user doesn't open the precise page they are after.
3: Write some code to create a hard copy 301 index.php file for each and every folder that is to be replaced.
4: Write code to create a hard copy 301 .php file for each and every page that is to be replaced.
5: We could just let the pages all die and list them with Google to advise of their death.
6: We could have the redirect managed by a database rather than .htaccess or single redirect files. Probably the most challenging thing will be to load the data in the first place, but I assume this could be done programatically - especially if the new URL can be inferred from the old. Many be I am missing another, simpler approach - please discuss0 -
Canonical questions
Hi, We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories) So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this; Product 1 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmaxwell
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page) Product 2 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns. As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content? Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!0 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
Does this require site-wide 301 redirects?
I have an old site that we are re-building, and also moving form Yahoo Stores to Big Commerce. yahoo uses site.com/page.html and BC uses site.com/page. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the old .html format? some of the pages on the old site have no links to them from external sites. Do they even need re-directs, or should I just let Google find the new page equivalents when they crawl the new version of the site? While some of the old pages (primarily product pages) have OK urls, others have obscure product numbers as the URL. Obviously the latter need re-directing to a more relevant page, but what about situations like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grabapple
_/accessory-product.html _ > product-accessory
In this example, the existing URL is fine, except for the .html extention. If I just used the old URL, would having a mix of /sample.html and /sample pages hurt me? Thanks in advance for your help and input! Dave0 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0 -
301 Redirect To Corresponding Link No Matter The URL?
Hey guys I have hosting on Host Gator with I believe an apache web server. I need a code to put in the HT ACCESS to redirect all WWW URL's to their corresponding http URL. I haven't been able to get a code to work. For example, http://www.mysite.org/page1.html -> http://mysite.org/page1.html , without having to redirect hundreds of pages individually Here is the format my server uses in the HT ACCESS file for 301 redirects. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.org$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.org
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinX
$RewriteRule ^Electric-Pressure-Cookers.html$ "http://mysite.org/Pressure-Cookers.html" [R=301,L] Thanks0