Should you 301, 302, or rel=canonical private pages?
-
What should you do with private 'logged in' pages from a seo perspective? They're not visible to crawlers and shouldn't be indexed, so what is best practice? Believe it or not, we have found quite a few back links to private pages and want to get the ranking benefit from them without them being indexed.
Eg: http://twiends.com/settings (Only logged in user can see the page)
302 them: We can redirect users/crawlers temporarily, but I believe this is not ideal from a seo perspective? Do we lose the link juice to this page?
301 them: We can do a permanent redirect with a short cache time. We preserve most link juice now, but we probably mess up the users browser. Users trying to reach a private page while logged out may have issues reaching it after logged in.
**Serve another page with rel=canonical tag: **We could serve back the home page without changing the URL. We use a canonical tag to tell the crawlers that it's a duplicate of the home page. We keep most of the link juice, and the browser is unaffected. Yes, a user might share that different URL now, but its unlikely.
We've been doing 302's up until now, now we're testing the third option. How do others solve this problem? Is there a problem with it?
Any advice appreciated.
-
You should 302 redirect non-authenticated users to http://twiends.com/login.
This is a better user experience, and you avoid the potential authentication issues with the 301. It's also not really correct or useful to make it a 301 redirect: users aren't being 'permanently' redirected to the login page, and there's not much utility in forcing link juice to be passed from /settings to /login either.
So requests to /settings should either show that user's settings or 302 redirect to /login. Don't duplicate the home page content and rely on a canonical tag. Your domain (and domain authority) are still going to benefit, and I just don't think there's enough of a case to sculpt the flow of link juice in this way. As Andreas has pointed out, the link juice isn't the most important consideration here; it's better to focus on user experience. Your homepage's ability to rank for any given term is unlikely to be affected by the decision to 'rel=canonical' all private pages to the home page.
-
He said I should use the canonical as what it's made for - he said I shouldn't use it as a redirect - I asked if I should/could use a canonical as redirect and he said: it could happen that google starts to think about it: is it a canonical? should it be a 301? Something like that, and he said I should use redirect Was a german Hangout in September/October.
He didn't say anything about link juice - I just thought it should be that way.
-
Hi Andreas, are you sure..? According to this article on Moz:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
"The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect"
Did John Mueller say that the tag does not pass link juice? Do you have a link to the hangout recording so that I can check it out..?
Thanks
-
A canonical is (guess it was John Mueller who said it) not give you any linkjuice.
He told me in a Webmaster Hangout to use Canonical only for that what it is made for (not for redirects in that hangout-case). Your idea isn't the perfect canonical example.I would simply redirect everybody (who is not logged in) to a login/sign page. That would be the best thing for the users (UX). You send them to the homepage, wich is not perfect for ux. I would ignore the linkjuice in that case.
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
-
Category pages, should I noindex them?
Hi there, I have a question about my blog that I hope you guys can answer. Should I no index the category and tag pages of my blog? I understand they are considered as duplicate content, but what if I try to work the keyword of that category? What would you do? I am looking forward to reading your answers 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | lucywrites0 -
Ranked page is not desired page
I have a question on a problem I am currently faced with. There is a certain keyword that my employer wants to rank for. The good news is that sometimes it does rank in the top 5 pages of Google. (It drops in and out) The bad news is that it is going to a page that we need to keep, but not the ideal place we want people who are looking for that keyword to go to. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with this type of situation and what tactic they used to get people to the better page.
On-Page Optimization | | trumpfinc1 -
Is Rel=Canonical the answer???
Hey Mozzers, Can you help me with something please. I have some important content going live next week for a client. We work on there blog optimisation and this piece of content is going live on both the blog and parent site. The parent site has huge DA in comparions to the blog. I want to get the traffic directed to the blog and get the blog ranking - bare in mind the content is exactly the same so it is dupe. If I want to get the blog ranking above the parent site and to direct the traffic here is a cross domain Rel=Canonical the answer? Has anyone else had this issue? Thanks Bush
On-Page Optimization | | Bush_JSM0 -
Rel canonical Issue
I have a huge rel canonical issue showing up on my website, and I'm not sure that I fully understand why. To my knowledge, this is something that comes about when alternate urls are used to link to the same page. However, this is not a technique that I've used with my website, yet it's still raising a flag on just about every page. http://bit.ly/jYyTYN Can anyone enlighten me on what's causing this? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | JayAdams320 -
Help I don't understand Rel Canonical
I'm really stuck on how to fix up Rel Canonical errors on a Wordpress site. I went in and changed all the URLs to remove the www and added / to the end. I get this message on page analysis details: <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://www.some-url.com.au/",</dd> <dd>"http://some-url..com.au/", and</dd> <dd>"http://some-url..com.au/"</dd> <dd>Well the first one with the www doesn't exists and the second two urls are the same! (Note that I have removed the actual URL for this post)</dd> <dd>I'm not sure how to read and fix the errors from the reports ether. The only issues I can see is that the 'Tag Value' has the www and the 'Page Title - URL' doesn't have the www.
On-Page Optimization | | zapprabbit
</dd>0 -
Missing meta descriptions on indexed pages, portfolio, tags, author and archive pages. I am using SEO all in one, any advice?
I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia
On-Page Optimization | | PHDAustralia680 -
Source page leading to a 404 pages in reports
Hi everybody, I wonder how to find and quickly correct 404 errors in my crawl reports : SeoMoz says me "http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead" is 404, but I can't figure out a source page where a link to that url appears. I tried a google link:http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead request, with no more luck. I imagine the trick is trivial, but I need it 🙂 Moreover, why do not show a list of pages referring to this 404 page on reports ? Thanks, Loïc
On-Page Optimization | | mandinga0 -
How do I fix a 404 with a 301
I understand the need for fixing 404's but I have yet to have a serious walkthrough of how to set up a 301. From all the talk on the forums and such I'm pretty sure this is easy but I've just never done it before and I could really use a walk through. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | BenRWoodard1