Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
-
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget).
A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url.
I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site.
We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
-
I know I promised you a crawl and I apologize for the delay I've been so busy lately. But here is something without your domain name on it that gives you an idea of what's going on I will private message you the rest of the information.
when I give you the report it will be in PDF format in addition to all five link you can click on anything with a green arrow or literally pretty much anything on the report to see more.
the amount of redirects you have are to say the least extremely high.
don't worry I have not put your domain in anything that is public.
Again I'm sorry for the delay,
Thomas
-
I have sent you a PM with information that I think you will find valuable. I don't know if you are allowed to continue to send over 1 or 2 PM's a day so feel free to email me at the email address I gave you or tom@tomzickell.com
This Is Definitely Affecting Your Crawl Budget And Having Looked at Your Site I Can Tell You Your Parameters Are a Huge Issue As Well. I Will Have Information for You in A Few Hours.
I will have your crawl finished in a few hours takes that long to actually do it but I gave you enterprise Ahrefs report where you can clearly see what's happening with the 301's is not good.
we need to figure out how many powerful inbound links you have pointing at these product pages if they are receiving two links because they have One and and the Other That Is A Problem. But I Am Assuming That Most of Them Are Not Going to Have This Issue.
You Also Have Two Sitemaps That Is a Negative Big Time.
Here Is a Photograph of That.
Talk to You Soon,
Thomas
-
To respond, I don't think it was an EMD or PMD (partial matching domain) issue as the domain is not relative to any keywords, industry, etc.
If the 301s are removed from these uppercase urls and sites link to them, would the canonical do enough to inform the crawlers to pick up the lowercase version where the canonical tag points to?
Would this cause link juice to be split between the uppercase urls and lowercase urls, or would the canonical take care of that? Note: there are plenty of links going to the uppercase urls because they were in existence for several years.
Thanks for the other suggestions.
-
Your suspicion seem to be warranted since Moz reports that for the July 2013 Panda Update: "The implication was that this was algorithmic and may have "softened" some previous Panda penalties". But on the other hand they state there were ranking fluctuations weeks prior to that, which they called "massive".
So what happened the weeks prior? This article by Moz's own Dr. Peter J Meyers provides a glue but nothing substantial: http://moz.com/blog/googles-multi-week-algorithm-update — it suggests that you may have been of the PMD's (partial match domains) or EMD's (exact match domains) that did not recover from that update. Curiously he also mentions the possibility that these might have been directly targeted.
Possibilities:
- You were directly targeted by Google. In which case your mission is to convince Google that you are now a good citizen. Better internal linking is a stronger sign of becoming non-spammy than going on an external link campaign.
- You were caught in a wider net of EMD's and PMD's that Google calculated to be too spammy and got a temporarily hammered. But adding the 301-s then took away your chance to recover via good internal linking that otherwise may have happened naturally ("blue widget" suggests you may run an e-commerce site). These two have identical results.
What to do:
- Remove 301, keep the canonical URL-s. As Thomas suggested.
- Add or renew internal links thoughtfully (couple of in-context links and related products, top sellers per page) and overview your breadcrumbs (if not already there).
- Add semantic SEO product (or whatever is relevant to you) mark-up, more unique images — everything you consider appropriate to signal to Google that you are not "spammy" anymore.
Just remember, you may no longer rely on your domain name to rank.
-
Hi,
simply by using a canonical tag in the beginning you would have not had to 301 redirect all of your links. Your internal linking structure can become a real issue if you have a lot of 301s creating redirect chains. There are so many variables in this that I honestly want to know more and why you made this change because you said this was before the rollout of Panda so were you doing anything that you thought would be bad?
-
Having a canonical tag with capital letters in the URL
-
as well as the canonical tag tells Google this is not duplicate content this is one URL.
or
I would be happy to do a brief audit on your website and give you the information using deep crawl this would allow me to give you a much more educated answer as to what you can do to fix this issue. However 301 redirecting that many links is not good when you can use a canonical tag. Simply send me a private message if you're uncomfortable posting the URL in the form.
Obviously anyone building a new website do not use capital letters in your URLs. However there are so many variations that the canonical tag tells Google this is the right URL rather it has capital letters in it or not.
Yes it is true that if you're using a Linux server especially having capital letters in your URLs is not preferred when building a site. However for you too 301 redirect all of your URLs or 50% because they are capitalized is way too much.
The canonical tag would have sufficed take care of the issue in an ideal situation obviously you would not create any links that have capital letters in them at all.
Would have been the ideal way of keeping your URLs simply because they have capitals in them does not make them terrible if Google knows which one is supposed to be the correct one.
http://example.com/Blue-Widget
Verse
301 to http://example.com/blue-widget
When Google crawls a website it is going to want the canonical so if you're old links had been written as
I don't know enough about the situation prior however when you think about it how many times can Google pick a different URL if it's in your's XML site map as well as your HTML site map?
the same thing occurs with
Google considers you must choose the correct URL and stick with it "Awesome links don't change".
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- Would fix this
in this case you can use it 301 redirect but you see the variances in all sorts of links this is corrected by picking the one you want and staying with it. If it's the original link I suggest you stick with that.
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development#4e
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
I hope this was of help to you,
Thomas
PS an example of what I was speaking about is right here. The domain name http://www.ras-tech.com CDN is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
I just had a CDN url created it the reason that this is relevant is the CDN has the option to put a canonical tag pointing to the origin server which is www.ras-tech.com but the URL for the CDN currently is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
Go to the waterfall section and you can see that it took this tool to ras-tech.com
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/kNiPW/http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
you can like at the site code and tell there is no CDN routed/ redirected through the site so this URL will take you to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/ this URL http://www.ras-tech.com unless I told it to go to another one using just the canonical.
try going to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/ and I guarantee it takes you to the origin.
-
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
-
Google Ignoring Canonical Tag for Hundreds of Sites
Bazaar Voice provides a pretty easy-to-use product review solution for websites (especially sites on Magento): https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/bazaarvoice-conversations-1.html If your product has over a certain number of reviews/questions, the plugin cuts off the number of reviews/questions that appear on the page. To see the reviews/questions that are cut off, you have to click the plugin's next or back function. The next/back buttons' URLs have a parameter of "bvstate....." I have noticed Google is indexing this "bvstate..." URL for hundreds of sites, even with the proper rel canonical tag in place. Here is an example with Microsoft: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zcxT7MRHHREJ:www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Surface-Book/productID.325716000%3Fbvstate%3Dpg:8/ct:r+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us My website is seeing hundreds of these "bvstate" urls being indexed even though we have a proper rel canonical tag in place. It seems that Google is ignoring the canonical tag. In Webmaster Console, the main source of my duplicate titles/metas in the HTML improvements section is the "bvstate" URLs. I don't necessarily want to block "bvstate" in the robots.txt as it will prohibit Google from seeing the reviews that were cutoff. Same response for prohibiting Google from crawling "bvstate" in Paramters section of Webmaster Console. Should I just keep my fingers crossed that Google honors the rel canonical tag? Home Depot is another site that has this same issue: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k0MBLFcu2PoJ:www.homedepot.com/p/DUROCK-Next-Gen-1-2-in-x-3-ft-x-5-ft-Cement-Board-172965/202263276%23!bvstate%3Dct:r/pg:2/st:p/id:202263276+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | redgatst1 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
301 Redirect Showing Up as Thousands Of Backlinks?
Hi Everyone, I'm currently doing quite a large back link audit on my company's website and there's one thing that's bugging me. Our website used to be split into two domains for separate areas of the business but since we have merged them together into one domain and have 301 redirected the old domain the the main one. But now, both GWT and Majestic are telling me that I've got 12,000 backlinks from that domain? This domain didn't even have 12,000 pages when it was live and I only did specific 301 redirects (ie. for specific URL's and not an overall domain level 301 redirect) for about 50 of the URL's with all the rest being redirected to the homepage. Therefore I'm quite confused about why its showing up as so many backlinks - Old redirects I've done don't usually show as a backlink at all. UPDATE: I've got some more info on the specific back links. But now my question is - is having this many backlinks/redirects from a single domain going to be viewed negatively in Google's eyes? I'm currently doing a reconsideration request and would look to try and fix this issue if having so many backlinks from a single domain would be against Google's guidelines. Does anybody have any ideas? Probably somthing very obvious. Thanks! Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
Setting up 301 Redirects after acquisition?
Hello! The company that I work for has recently acquired two other companies. I was wondering what the best strategy would be as it relates to redirects / authority. Please help! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colin.Accela0 -
301 Redirect from ASP.NET to PHP...Is it possible?
Hi all, I'm trying to migrate my current website over to wordpress however my current website is ASP.NET and obviously Wordpress uses PHP. Is it possible to perform a 301 redirect from a asp.net to a php? Or do you need to convert the asp.net language into php? Or something different? I welcome your thoughts? Regards, Thomas Rochford
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
DNS or 301 Website Redirect
We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label. Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice. We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar. Will it be their url or our sub domain? Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bloomnation0 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850