Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?

[ABK717]

We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget).

A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url.

I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site.

We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I know I promised you a crawl and I apologize for the delay I've been so busy lately. But here is something without your domain name on it that gives you an idea of what's going on I will private message you the rest of the information.

when I give you the report it will be in PDF format in addition to all five link you can click on anything with a green arrow or literally pretty much anything on the report to see more.

the amount of redirects you have  are to say the least extremely high.

don't worry I have not put your domain in anything that is public.

Again I'm sorry for the delay,

Thomas

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[BlueprintMarketing]

I have sent you a PM with information that I think you will find valuable. I don't know if you are allowed to continue to send over 1 or 2 PM's a day so feel free to email me at the email address I gave you or tom@tomzickell.com

This Is Definitely Affecting Your Crawl Budget And Having Looked at Your Site I Can Tell You Your Parameters Are a Huge Issue As Well. I Will Have Information for You in A Few Hours.

I will have your crawl finished in a few hours takes that long to actually do it but I gave you enterprise Ahrefs report where you can clearly see what's happening with the 301's is not good.

we need to figure out how many powerful inbound links you have pointing at these product pages if they are receiving two links because they have One and and the Other That Is A Problem. But I Am Assuming That Most of Them Are Not Going to Have This Issue.

You Also Have Two Sitemaps That Is a Negative Big Time.

Here Is a Photograph of That.

Talk to You Soon,

Thomas

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[ABK717]

To respond, I don't think it was an EMD or PMD (partial matching domain) issue as the domain is not relative to any keywords, industry, etc.

If the 301s are removed from these uppercase urls and sites link to them, would the canonical do enough to inform the crawlers to pick up the lowercase version where the canonical tag points to?

Would this cause link juice to be split between the uppercase urls and lowercase urls, or would the canonical take care of that? Note: there are plenty of links going to the uppercase urls because they were in existence for several years.

Thanks for the other suggestions.

[RobertJakobson]

Your suspicion seem to be warranted since Moz reports that for the July 2013 Panda Update: "The implication was that this was algorithmic and may have "softened" some previous Panda penalties". But on the other hand they state there were ranking fluctuations weeks prior to that, which they called "massive".

So what happened the weeks prior? This article by Moz's own Dr. Peter J Meyers provides a glue but nothing substantial: http://moz.com/blog/googles-multi-week-algorithm-update — it suggests that you may have been of the PMD's (partial match domains) or EMD's (exact match domains) that did not recover from that update. Curiously he also mentions the possibility that these might have been directly targeted.

Possibilities:

1. You were directly targeted by Google. In which case your mission is to convince Google that you are now a good citizen. Better internal linking is a stronger sign of becoming non-spammy than going on an external link campaign.
2. You were caught in a wider net of EMD's and PMD's that Google calculated to be too spammy and got a temporarily hammered. But adding the 301-s then took away your chance to recover via good internal linking that otherwise may have happened naturally ("blue widget" suggests you may run an e-commerce site). These two have identical results.

What to do:

1. Remove 301, keep the canonical URL-s. As Thomas suggested.
2. Add or renew internal links thoughtfully (couple of in-context links and related products, top sellers per page) and overview your breadcrumbs (if not already there).
3. Add semantic SEO product (or whatever is relevant to you) mark-up, more unique images — everything you consider appropriate to signal to Google that you are not "spammy" anymore.

Just remember, you may no longer rely on your domain name to rank.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi,

simply by using a canonical tag in the beginning you would have not had to 301 redirect all of your links. Your internal linking structure can become a real issue if you have a lot of 301s creating redirect chains. There are so many variables in this that I honestly want to know more and why you made this change because you said this was before the rollout of Panda so were you doing anything that you thought would be bad?

• Having a canonical tag with capital letters in the URL

• as well as the canonical tag tells Google this is not duplicate content this is one URL.

• http://example.com/Blue-Widget

or

1. http://example.com/Blue-Widget

I would be happy to do a brief audit on your website and give you the information using deep crawl this would allow me to give you a much more educated answer as to what you can do to fix this issue. However 301 redirecting that many links is not good when you can use a canonical tag. Simply send me a private message if you're uncomfortable posting the URL in the form.

Obviously anyone building a new website do not use capital letters in your URLs. However there are so many variations that the canonical tag tells Google this is the right URL rather it has capital letters in it or not.

Yes it is true that if you're using a Linux server especially having capital letters in your URLs is not preferred when building a site. However for you too 301 redirect all of your URLs or 50% because they are capitalized is  way too much.

The canonical tag  would have sufficed take care of the issue in an ideal situation obviously you would not create any links that have capital letters in them at all.

Would have been the ideal way of keeping your URLs simply because they have capitals in them does not make them terrible if Google knows which one is supposed to be the correct one.

http://example.com/Blue-Widget

Verse

301 to http://example.com/blue-widget

When Google crawls a website it is going to want the canonical so if you're old links had been written as

I don't know enough about the situation prior however when you think about it how many times can Google pick a different URL if it's in your's XML site map as well as your HTML site map?

the same thing occurs with

Google considers  you must choose the correct URL and stick with it  "Awesome links don't change".

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• Would fix this

in this case you can use it 301 redirect but you see the variances in all sorts of links this is corrected by picking the one you want and staying with it. If it's the original link I suggest you stick with that.

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development#4e

http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

I hope this was of help to you,

Thomas

PS  an example of what I was speaking about is right here. The domain name http://www.ras-tech.com CDN is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/

I just had a CDN  url created it the reason that this is relevant is the CDN has the option to put a canonical tag pointing to the origin server  which is www.ras-tech.com but the URL for the CDN currently is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/

Go to the waterfall section and you can see that it took this tool to ras-tech.com

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/kNiPW/http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/

you can like at the site code and tell there is no CDN routed/ redirected through the site so  this URL will take you to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/  this URL http://www.ras-tech.com unless I told it to go to another one using just the canonical.

try going to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/  and I guarantee it takes you to the origin.

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