Understanding Redirects and Canonical Tags in SEO: A Complex Case

[chueneke]

Hi everyone,

nothing serious here, i'm just playing around doing my experiments
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

This is the old page /linkaufbau

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,
Chris

[Farhana786]

When you move a web page from one URL to another, you use redirects to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the new URL. 301 is a permanent redirect. It tells search engines that the page has permanently moved to a new location. 302 is a temporary redirect. It tells search engines that the move is only temporary, so they should keep the original page indexed. Meta Refresh is a type of redirect that happens on the page level. It's not as SEO-friendly as server-side redirects because it doesn't pass the same level of link equity. Canonical tags are HTML elements that help prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a web page.