Canonical link vs root domain
-
I have a wordpress website installed on http://domain.com/home/ instead of http://domain.com - Does it matter whether I leave it that way with a canonical link from the domain.com to the domain.com/home/ or should I move the wordpress files and database to the root domain?
-
Not quite certain what you mean here, Joseph. Are you saying that the whole website is made up of a WordPress install, and that install is at /home? Or are saying that you have a website, and part of that site is a WordPress install at /home. I.e. are there any pages of your website that are not generated by WordPress?
If your whole website consists of just the WordPress install, you absolutely need to move it to the root of the domain. There are just too many future problems, compromises and hassles if you leave it where it is.
The canonical tag (even if you could use it in this instance) is no magic bullet to make up for a sub-optimal architecture decision.
Paul
-
If you are adding Canonical tag to the main website, it will tell Google that the content available on domain.com is the original content but if the links are going to point on domain.com/home then link juice will not transfer to the main Domain.
If I would be at your place I would have tried using 301 redirection from domain.com/home to domain.com as this way all of my content will be appearing on the main domain and if my links are pointing to domain.com/home the juice will automatically transfer to the home page as the redirection is 301.
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
Canonical vs 301 - Web Development
So I'm having a conversation with the development team at my work and I'm a little tired today so I thought I would ask for other opinions. The currently the site duplicates it's full site by having a 200 show with or without a trailing slash. I have asked for a 301 redirect to with the trailing slash. They countered with having all the rel=canonical be the trailing slash, which I know is acceptable. My issue is that while a rel=canonical is acceptable, since my site has a very high level of competition and a very aggressive link building strategy, I believe that it may be beneficial to have the 301 redirect. BUT, I may be wrong. When we're talking hundreds of thousands of links, I would love to have them directly linked instead of possibly splitting them up between a duplicate page that has a correct canonical. I'm curious to what everyone thinks though....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn1 -
Outreach - When is it important to wait vs ask for the link with the first email?
Hello, When is it appropriate to wait till the second or third email to let the person I'm outreaching to know that I want a link? Things I'm giving away: 1. Broken Link Building 2. $100 adwords traffic 3. social sharing of their URL (twitter & facebook)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Relative paths vs absolute paths for links - is there a difference?
Is it better to use links like: some link VS some link is there a difference for the search engine algorithms? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cdolek1 -
Cross Domain Rel Canonical for Affiliates?
Hi We use the Cross Domain Rel Canonical for duplicate content between our own websites, but what about affiliates sites who want our XML feed, (descriptions of our products). We don´t mind being credited but would this present a danger for us? Who is controlling the use of that cross domain rel canonical, us in our feed or them? Is there another way around it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
How can I tell which website pages are hosted on the root domain vs the www subdomain?
One of the SEOmoz help desk professionals told me this today regarding some of my website pages. "it looks like you have pages hosted as separate pages on both the root domain and the www subdomain, which means that these pages are competing for rankings and authority. You may want to consider a 301 redirect or the use of rel=canonical tags.". Can anyone help me understand this? How can I tell which pages are which?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Redirecting One Page of Content on Domain A to Domain B
Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain. That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords. However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content. I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites. Has anyone ever done this? Did it work as you expected? Did the content hold its rankings after being moved? Any advice or philosophical opinions on this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL2