Canonical tags required when redirecting?
-
Hello,
My client bought a new domain and he wants it to be the main domain of his company. His current domain though has been online for 10 years and ranks pretty well on a few keywords. I feel it is necessary to redirect the old domain to the new one to take advantage of its ranking and avoid any broken links.
The sites are exactly the same. Same sections and same content. Is it necessary to place canonical tags on one of the sites to avoid duplicate content/sites?
Any thoughts?
Thanks
-
There are number of other signals you can send the search engines to try to speed up indexing of the new site, Eblan.
- once new site is live, resubmit xml sitemap to both Google And Bing Webmaster Tools
- use Fetch as Googlebot and Fetch as Bingbot on each Webmaster Tools to crawl and submit the most important pages from each of the most important sections of the site
- earn some new links to the pages of the new site (social media is especially useful for this - remember to update address in all SM profiles)
- request that high-value links pointing to old site are updated to new site (this can take some outreach to other webmasters - start this process well before the new site is to go live).
Hope that helps?
Paul
P.S. Here's an extensive SEOMoz post on the steps to implement and monitor a domain migration. And here's a great migration checklist infographic. You're going to want to get as much of this right as possible, as there can be considerable risk when doing this kind of major change
-
Hey Paul,
Thanks a lot for the info, to be honest I didn't even consider that. saved my life there.
And I hope Google doesn't take long to index the new domain.
Cheers!
-
Welcome, Eblan. Also, don't forget to use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools as an additional signal to Google for the domain change.
Paul
-
Thanks a lot Paul and Mike!
Sorry for the late response.
Yes, the new domain is all about rebranding. Also, their old domain was too long.
-
If you use 301 (permanent) redirects, there's no need for canonicals on the old pages because as far as the search engines are concerned, you're telling them the old pages no longer even exist. In fact, done properly, you can actually remove the old site altogether after a month or 6 weeks of the redirects being in place. (You point the old domain to the new site and place the redirects in the new site's .htaccess file)
This kind of move can be a big deal for a site that's been around for 10 years. Hopefully there's a compelling reason for wanting to change the domain name? Business rebranding, for example?
Paul
-
If you're 301 redirecting everything to proper, relevant alternative pages on the other site then there's no reason to canonicalize the page.
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 to come up with the best title tags?
Hi Guys, I know title tags is one of the most important things that google looks at, any tips or advice around how I can go about improving the ones I have currently? I'm ranking pretty decent for all domains, slowly but surely, my main keywords are online psychics, online psychic readings, chat psychics, chat readings, tarot readings, and psychic readings. Any advice would be much appreciated, or direct me to resources I can look into helping me get onto the right path. my website is http://bit.ly/1KTbWg0 Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Canonical tag - link juice to the frontpage
I only wants to be 100% sure about using the canonical tag.. I want to use it on pages that rankes together with the frontpage in Google, but i only want the frontpage to rank alone and to have the link juice from the other 2 sites direct-ed to the frontpage.. Hope you agre that its the correct way to doo so?? Wich one is correct: http://www.testtest.com/”> Or this http://www.testtest.com/”/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seopeter290 -
Parallax and Title Tags
I've noticed an issue with our site, which uses parallax on multiple pages. Here is an example: If you search for About SQL Sentry, you get the correct title tag and description If you search for SQL Sentry Careers (which is on the about us page) it appears that Google has made up a title tag and description for it. Is there any way to force a separate title tag for a part of a parallax page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Rel=canonical
I have seen that almost all of my website pages need rel=canonical tag. Seems that something's wrong here since I have unique content to every page. Even show the homepage as a rel=canonical which doesnt make sense. Can anyone suggest anything? or just ignore those issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arcade880 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1 -
301 Redirect shenanigans.
So our website (www.FrontlineMobility.com) Has a canonical link redirect to the non www. version. However when I put in website.com it comes up with a small list of links and says this site links to www.website.com. So I'm curious if I used to wrong canonical linking method( that is the method I tried and I placed it in the Head Tags.) I greatly appreciate any assistance in this matter ^.^
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0