Is it better to use XXX.com or XXX.com/index.html as canonical page

[Nanook1]

Is it better to use 301 redirects or canonical page? I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc.

[Dr-Pete]

Glad you got it sorted out. If you're 301-redirecting a lot of domains, I'd suggest doing it gradually or maybe holding off on the lowest-quality domains. Google can see a massive set of redirects as a bit of a red flag (too many people have bought up cheap domains and 301-redirected to consolidate the link equity). If the domains are really all closely related or if you're only talking about a handful (<5) then it's probably not a big issue.

[Nanook1]

I think things may be sorted out, but I am not sure. I actually put in 301-redirects from a bunch of domains that I own to this new domain, the content of which will eventually replace my main domain. But, I need to get the domain properly set up and optimized before I move it to my primary domain to replace the ancient web site. At that time, I will also redirect this site to the new, old site.

I used to have Google ad-words tied to some of the domains that I 301-redirected to the new web site that I am building. Those were just a waste of money, however, so I put them on hold. I also had a lot of problems with semel and buttons for web bouncing off those pages that I re-directed. I put in .htaccess commands to stop those spam sites and that seems to work.

[Dr-Pete]

Google seems to be indexing 30-ish pages, but when I look at the cached home-page, I'm actually seeing the home-page of http://rfprototype.com/. Did you recently change domains or 301-redirect the old site? The cache data is around Christmas (after the original question was posted), so I think we're missing part of the puzzle here.

[Nanook1]

So, I think I may have had things wrong. For one thing, it seems like moz and Google are only indexing 2 pages, while the site index shows something like 80 pages. (I suspect an image is a page, and there are a lot of images. But, there are about 10 or 12 distinct pages at the moment. Also, Google and moz do not seem to show the correct key words in any sense like they should, leading me to think that they were just spidering 2 pages. I don't know why. I added the following to my index.html header:

and

I assume I put them in the correct place. I also believe I don't need canonical pages anywhere else.

Should these changes to my index.html make the proper changes?

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, I'd have to concur - all the evidence and case studies I've seen suggest that rel=canonical almost always passes authority (link equity). There are exceptions, but honestly, there are exceptions with 301s, too.

I think the biggest difference, practically, is the impact on human visitors. 301-redirects take people to a new page, whereas canonical tags don't.

[Matt-Williamson]

In terms of rel=canonical that will pass value the same as a 301 redirect - for evidence have a look here:

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

"Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement."

See DR Pete's response in this Moz Q&A:

http://moz.com/community/q/do-canonical-tags-pass-all-of-the-link-juice-onto-the-url-they-point-to

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?rd=1

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical

Matts Cutts stated there is not a whole lot of difference between the 301 and the canonical - they will both lose "just a tiny little amount bit, not very much at all" of credit from the referring page.

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, this is how I look at the situation.

1. ABC.com
2. ABC.com/index.php

So you have two URLs and the question is either to redirect301 or use canonical? In my opinion 301 is a better solution and this is because it will not only redirect people to the preferred version but the link value as well.

Whereas, with canonicals only search engines will know what is the preferred page but it will not transfer the link value which can help you with organic rankings.

Hope this helps!

[Matt-Williamson]

You would put the canonical link in the index file and I would point that at the xxx.com version rather than the xxx.com/index.html version as people visiting your sites homepage are going to enter the domain and not the specific page so xxx.com rather than xxx.com/index.html.

There are some great articles on Moz explaining all this which I would suggest that you read -

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

Dr Pete also did this post answering common questions on rel=canonical.

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

In terms of 301 redirects and canonicalization both pass the same amount of authority gained by different pages. If you are trying to keep it as clean as possible you need to be careful you don't create an issue redirecting your index file to your domain - here is an old post explaining how moz solved this 301 redirect on an Apache server

http://moz.com/blog/apache-redirect-an-index-file-to-your-domain-without-looping

I personally find that if all your links on your site reference your preferred(canonical) URL for the homepage so in this case xxx.com and you redirect the www version to this or vice versa depending on your preference then you add a canonical in the index.html file pointing at xxx.com in this case unless you prefer to do it the other way round with www.xxx.com for both you will be fine.

Hope this helps

[Nanook1]

I forgot. Of course, there is no xxx.com page, per se. It is actually xxx.com/index.html so if you needed to put the canonical reference on xxx.com, how would you do it?