Canonical tags pointing at old URLs that have been 301'd
-
I have a site which has various white label sites with the same content on each. I have canonical tags on the white label sites pointing to the main site. I have changed some URLs on the main site and 301'd the previous URL to the new ones. Is it ok to have the canonicals pointing to the old URLs that now have a 301 redirect on them.
-
So, you basically (in some cases) have a canonical pointing to a URL, and then that URL 301s to a new URL? If that's the case, I think Nakul is right - it's not ideal. It's not a disaster, but you're basically putting Google through extra hops and you could be losing link-juice. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to calculate how much. Ideally, I'd change the canonicals to point to the new URLs.
-
It would be best to update the canonical URLs to go directly to the new location. Having too many redirects, canonicals can often create these complex situations causing issues in the long-run. The intent of the canonical tag is to pass the bots a strong directive about what the correct URL is. So it would be wise to use the correct URL instead of a URL which does not exist (301'd). I hope this helps.
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
-
Understanding Redirects and Canonical Tags in SEO: A Complex Case
Hi everyone, nothing serious here, i'm just playing around doing my experiments 🙂
Technical SEO | | chueneke
but if any1 of you guys understand this chaos and what was the issue here, i'd appreciate if you try to explain it to me. I had a page "Linkaufbau" on my website at https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau. My .htaccess file contains only basic SEO stuff: # removed ".html" using htaccess RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ (.*)\.html\ HTTP RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ $1 [R=301,L] # internally added .html if necessary RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$ RewriteRule (.*) $1\.html [L] # removed "index" from directory index pages RewriteRule (.*)/index$ $1/ [R=301,L] # removed trailing "/" if not a directory RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$ RewriteRule (.*)/ $1 [R=301,L] # Here’s the first redirect: RedirectPermanent /index / My first three questions: Why do I need this rule? Why must this rule be at the top? Why isn't this handled by mod_rewrite? Now to the interesting part: I moved the Linkaufbau page to the SEO folder: https://chriseo.de/seo/linkaufbau and set up the redirect accordingly: RedirectPermanent /linkaufbau /seo/linkaufbau.html I deleted the old /linkaufbau page. I requested indexing for /seo/linkaufbau in the Google Search Console. Once the page was indexed, I set a canonical to the old URL: <link rel="canonical" href="https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau"> Then I resubmitted the sitemap and requested indexing for /seo/linkaufbau again, even though it was already indexed. Due to the canonical tag, the page quickly disappeared. I then requested indexing for /linkaufbau and /linkaufbau.html in GSC (the old, deleted page). After two days, both URLs were back in the serps:: https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau.html this is the new page /seo/linkaufbau
b14ee095-5c03-40d5-b7fc-57d47cf66e3b-grafik.png This is the old page /linkaufbau
242d5bfd-af7c-4bed-9887-c12a29837d77-grafik.png Both URLs are now in the search results and all rankings are significantly better than before for keywords like: organic linkbuilding linkaufbau kosten linkaufbau service natürlicher linkaufbau hochwertiger linkaufbau organische backlinks linkaufbau strategie linkaufbau agentur Interestingly, both URLs (with and without .html) redirect to the new URL https://chriseo.de/seo/linkaufbau, which in turn has a canonical pointing to https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau (without .html). In the SERPs, when https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau is shown, my new, updated snippet is displayed. When /linkaufbau.html is shown, it displays the old, deleted page that had already disappeared from the index. I have now removed the canonical tag. I don't fully understand the process of what happened and why. If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful. Best regards,
Chris0 -
Optimization expert suggesting we add Canonical tag to every page on site
Hi guys, We're currently launching a new page, and we have an optimization and technical SEO expert (highly rated on Upwork, very intelligent, has solved complicated issues in the past and improved our Core Web Vitals greatly) suggesting we put canonical tags on every page of site, pointing to itself (other than the case of where canonicals should point to other page, we have those listed separately. Do you guys see a benefit to this? Could it harm us? He says large retailers do this, couldn't quite glean the benefit from it though. Current site ranks well and isn't set up like this. Any insight would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
Is a canonical tag required for already redirecting URLs?
Hi everyone, One of our websites was changed to non-www to www. The non-www pages were then redirected to avoid duplicate issue. Moz and Screaming Frog flagged a number of these redirected pages as missing canonical tags. Is the canonical tag still required for pages already redirecting? Or is it detecting another possible duplicate page that we haven't redirected yet? Also, the rankings for this website isn't improving despite having us optimising these pages as best as we could. I'm wondering if this canonical tag issue may be affecting it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
Shopify Canonicals for Tagged Filters
I've been researching this topic endlessly and thought I had arrived at a solution but Screaming Frog indicates my solution was not successful. Problem: I used tags to filter my collections pages. The result, I discovered, was the creation of dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, of additional collection URLs for each possible permutation of tag filters. I would like to make the collection page URL, with no tag filters, the canonical. Proposed Solution: I found the following code described somewhere as the solution: {% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %} {% else %} {% endif %} However, I crawled my site with Screaming Frog and found that the canonical link element is still listed as the URL with the tags included. The crawler does recognizes the "noindex" instruction. Any ideas on what the best move is here?
Technical SEO | | vgusvg0 -
Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?
I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not. The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in. Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.
Technical SEO | | Romana0 -
Penalty for many domains pointing to the same URL?
I've searched around on the Google forums, and other sources (including the Q&A!), but haven't seen a solid answer on this one. I've recently discovered that throughout the years we've had several hundred domains pointed to our homepage. These are our domains and are related to our niche. I believe they were pointed for the purposes of attracting type-in traffic. Before last month I knew at least some existed, but I didn't realize the extent until last week. I know there isn't any positive SEO effect to doing this (except perhaps if any of the domains have links to them, and a few do), but is there any negative SEO effect? I realize that there are legitimate redirects for type-in traffic, like misspellings and such, but most of these are just exact-match-domains. It just screams unnatural to me, but perhaps I'm just a little paranoid. 🙂
Technical SEO | | tncomseo0 -
Using Canonical URLs option in Platinum SEO for Wordpress
SEOMOZ says that my site has 150 <a title="Click for Help!">Canonical URLs and lists that as a potential problem. It's a check box in the settings for Platinum SEO and here is the description it provides:</a> <a title="Click for Help!">Choose this option to set up canonical URLs for your Home page, Single Post, Category and Tag Pages.</a> I have the option engaged. So I was trying to figure out the best thing to do. I have already instructed it to automatically make 301 redirects for any permalink changes and have instructed it to "noindex" tag archives,rss comment feeds, and rss feeds. I've only been doing this for about a year and am really confused right now. After reading most of your posts about the subject I have a much better understanding, but still very confused. Help..Please...
Technical SEO | | pressingtheissue0 -
After entire site is noindex'd, how long to recover?
A programmers 'accidentally' put "name="robots" content="noindex" />" into every single page of one of my sites (articles, landing pages, home page etc). This happened on Monday, and we just noticed today. Ugh... We've fixed the issue; how long will it take to get reindexed? Will we instantly retain our same positions for keywords? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | EricPacifico0