301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
-
Hi,
Newbie alert!
I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly.
The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags.
Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new?
Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case?
Thx in anticipation.
-
The most accurate way is to do it manually. Doing a site:YOURDOMAIN.com in Google will alert you to most of the ugly URLs you want to get rid of.
-
Thanks for that David . . . makes sense.
Can you recommend any tools to help with this job or is it still mostly a manual process?
Cheers.
-
"Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new?"
Any URL's that are indexed should be redirected to the correct version. For example if you have both a database URL and a canonical URL both indexed in search results, then they both should be sent to the correct version.
Also, having only canonical URLs in your submitted sitemaps will help to remove a lot of these, even without redirects.
-
Ok, here is my understanding regarding canonicals and how it works with redirect. 301 redirect means the old URL is shifting its all value and user to the new domain (unlike 302 that only derives traffic but contain the URL value to itself only).
Whereas Canonicals indicates Google the preferred version of the domain so theoretically if you use the canonicals on every page Google should pick the redirected page as 301 will take Google to the final destination anyways…
What will I do?
If Possible, I will map all the redirected URLs and remove canonicals from there just to be on the safe side but I don’t think having there will be much of a difference as Google as at least that smart.
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
-
Rel=canonical or 301 to pass on page authority/juice
I have a large body of product support documentation and there are similar pages for each of versions of the product, with minor changes as the product changes. The two oldest versions of this documentation get the best ranking and are powering Google snippets--however, this content is out of date. The team responsible for the support documentation wants current pages to rank higher. I suggested 301 redirects but they want to maintain the old page content for clients still using the older version of the product. Is there a way to move a page's power to a more updated version of the page, but without wiping out the old content? Considering recommending canonical tags, but I'm not sure this will get me all the way there either as there are some differences between pages, especially as the product has changed over time. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | rachelholdgrafer0 -
301 redirects don't work properly
Hello all, I've been working on 301 redirects for a bit and normally it's no problem but some seem to be going wrong. Redirect 301 /3-zits.html http://www.bankstellenshop.com/banken/3-zits.html This one works properly but the following one gives a very strange result as it goes to http://www.bankstellenshop.com/bankstellen.html/u (no idea where the .html comes from) Redirect 301 /bankstellen/u http://www.bankstellenshop.com/bankstellen/u.html Any idea what I'm doing wrong or what should change? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Kapottefietsband0 -
301 redirects
Hello. Our site was recently rebuilt, and we switched from using index.php in all the urls to not using it at all. We also changed the names of many of our pages. So the urls have been renamed from "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/". While we were at it, we changed from "_" to "-" as our word separators in the urls. In the .htaccess file, we have a small block of code that strips out "index.php/" from all requests. This code redirects a request for "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/old_page_name/" For your information, the code that strips out "index.php/" is: RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.index.php [NC]
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/uSZWTLna/.
RewriteRule (.?)index.php/(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L] Then we have 301 redirects from "example.com/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/" QUESTION 1: Is this two-step redirect approach okay, or would it be better to skip the separate index.php stripping code and simply have 301 redirects that include "index.php" in the urls? QUESTION 2: Will we lose some of the benefit of the links that have to pass through a 301 redirect? QUESTION 3: We have 50 or so redirects. Will this affect performance of the site? How many redirects does it take to start affecting performance? Thank you!0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Secure Vs Non-Secure Redirects
I have a client who has a lot of duplicate pages on their site. The pages are secure and then non secure counterparts. Not sure why they have this in place but i recomended that they redirect on to the other or vice versa using 301 redirects. I am getting some questions as to why they should do this. Does anyone have a good document outlining the reasoning behind this? For me its just a matter of cleaning up duplicate content but wondering if there is any technical data out there.
Technical SEO | | gkellyiii0 -
301 redirects
At the moment it's possible to access the home page of my website via two different urls, with and without www. and you've told me that this can be resolved with Canonicalization and a 301 redirect. Do I do this with my web hosting package or in my html pages? If I can't do it with my web host (1&1) then is there an idiot's guide of how to do it yourself? I've also got both the domain vamospaella.co.uk and vamospaella.com. Is it better to have one of these redirecting to the other for UK traffic (at the moment .co.uk redirects to .com) Thanks
Technical SEO | | melissa10 -
Google Webmaster redirect vs 301 redirect
OK assuming a client's website has the right tracking script (hopefully analytics isn't effected by this issue), ... what happens if the htaccess file has a 301 redirect to the www-address, but within Google Webmaster Tools, the address chosen to crawl by Google is the non-www address? How will Google handle and which address takes precedence in this situation? _Cindy
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0 -
301 Redirect Question
I'm working on a site that has a lot of indexed pages and backlinks to both domain.com and www.domain.com. Will using a 301 redirect to send domain.com to www.domain.com merge all of the indexed pages and links over to www.domain.com, thereby strengthening the www?
Technical SEO | | Yo_Adrian0