When to use mod rewrite / canonical / 301 redirect
-
Hello,
I have taken over the management of a site which has a big problem with duplicate content. The duplicate content is caused by two things:
- Upper and lower case urls e.g: www.mysite.com/blog and www.mysite.com/Blog
- The other reason is the use of product filters / pagination which mean you can get to the same 'page' via different filters. The filters generate separate URLs.
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?solution=0&page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy?page=1
http://www.cpio.co.uk/casestudy/filter?solution=0"Am I right to assume that for the case sensitive URLs I should use a 301 redirect because I only want the lower page to be shown?
For the issue with dynamic URLs should we implement a mod-rewrite and 301 to one page?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Mat -
Hi
I would definitely setup a 301 redirect for the case sensitive URLs issue - you may already know how to setup this up but I thought I would include this link - http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/18670/how-to-redirect-any-url-to-lowercase-url
For your pagination issue you need to look at if it is possible to change /casestudy to a "view all" page and then place a canonical link to the /casestudy page in the of each page in the paginated set.
Another option for your pagination is using rel="next" and rel="prev" and for the filter parameters you could tell Googlebot not to crawl these parameter URLs.
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
-
Should I set 301 Redirects or keep old permalinks?
I just built a new site for a client and the new site has pretty links like domain.com/about-us. The old site has been around for a VERY long time and had links like domain.com/aboutus. I want to do 301 redirects because from my understanding, it minimizes the negative SEO impact. But the client wants to keep the permalinks without the hyphens to match the old links. What is the best route, considering SEO? BTW, the site is still on the same domain. Thanks in advance for your help! Neik
Technical SEO | | glassh0use0 -
Should I use canonical tag in these cases?
Should I use canonical tag in these cases? On the page itself (with the tag pointing to itself) On pages that doesn't have duplicate versions
Technical SEO | | GoMentor0 -
301 Redirect question www to root.com
I have a site that has been up for a few weeks now and is currently in a www format and i am considering changing it to just mydomain.com I also have quite a few directory listings (including google places/bing) for this site w/ the www. url. If i do this, change it in my google analytics, and update my wordpress internal page + htaccess file. Will i lose any of the link juice i had from my www pages? Would this be something that would be advised since i've registered for many sites, or is there a potential that this could end up hurting me? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
What factors matters the most when using a 301 permanent redirect?
Hi SEOmozzers, I have a client that has couple of duplicates but I am debating if i should just kill those pages or use 301 Permanent redirects. I know SEO moz provides 2 important factors to look at which are PA and link root domain. 1.Which one matters the most? or which one should I look at first to make a decision? 2. I have empty pages creating duplicate content with a PA of 14 and 1 linking root domain. my thought is to kill the page by inserting a meta NO INDEX. If you don't agree and think I should 301 to an existing page that needs link juice, let me know. Thank you mozzers 🙂
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
301 redirect or 302
A client of mine has an international company named www.taxglobalizers.com if you come from Holland they 302 redirect you to the www.taxglobalizers.com/en version of the site and if you come from Holland they redirect with a 302 to www.taxglobalizers.com/nl version. I think it is best to change this in a 301 redirect. Am i correct in this? Kind Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?
Hi All, We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example. Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place. We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs? If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs? Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s? Thanks, all! Chris
Technical SEO | | BaseKit0 -
Worth Changing Redirect From 302 to 301?
Hi, I'm doing an audit on a site that had a redesign in Dec 2009. For some reason I looked to see what kind of redirects were used from the old pages to the current ones, and it looks like they used 302s, which obviously isn't ideal. Given that it's been so long and those pages have looong since been de-indexed, is it worth me suggesting that they change those old redirects to 301s? My thinking is that if those old pages were linked to externally then I should recommend it, but I can't find any link info on Linkscape/OSE, Majestic SEO or YSE. Any comments appreciated.
Technical SEO | | The_Heavies0 -
301 redirect
We have just had an outside SEO agency report on our site: One of things brought up were arounf broken links, and how they class them as broken links. Could any body tell me whether this statement holds true please, as I am not aware of this "Our latest intelligence shows that google are downgrading ranking from sites that feature 301 redirects within the internal link structure". Any help would be greatly appreciated Regards
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0