Considering redirecting or canonicalization - Best Practice
-
Hi,
I'm having a techinical problem and I would like advise on the effects this is having on my SEO efforts.
My old site www.oldsiteexample.com (live for about 8 years)
Directs to my new site www.example.com which is fine BUT
When I type me new website into the tool bar both sides are found & do not direct to one domain;
www.example.com & example.com (both the same site)
What is the best practice here? Direct my new non www to my new www site considering my old website directs to the www.
Advise & the SEO affects this is having my website would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
-
MJ, the challenge with that suggestion is it sounds like you are maintaining two websites. That solution would not work for any situation with UGC or any data which changes over time.
Even in cases where the pages were purely static content, a canonical tag would notify search engines of the page you wish to be indexed but not users.
-
A 301 will pass over the link equity also!
-
Also, Ryan is of course correct to say you can use the www. or non www. version - I just have a preference for www. because I think it looks neater!
-
I agree that a 301 is most certainly the best long term solution; however the canonical also provides an opportunity to send over some of the value to the new page/domain before you do that. Hence I usually implement the canonical for a month or two, then redirect. Especially when you're moving to a new domain, it's a good way to faze in the move over rather than going cold turkey, as it were.
If the site has over 600 pages, I'd pick the 50-100 most common landing pages (see Google Analytics) and transfer them. If 10 of the pages get 10000 visits each and the other 590 get 2 visits each, maybe just do the top ten. Hope that makes sense!
-
You can use the www or non-www version of your site. The important thing is to choose one version and remain consistent. It sounds like you prefer the "www" version which is a perfectly fine choice.
When given a choice between canonical or 301, the best practice is 301. Both work, but a 301 is preferred.
Two additional best practices:
1. I know it can be a lot of work but you really should redirect each page of the old site to the corresponding page on the new site. If you simply changed domains the 301 can be written with a single regex statement to replace "oldsiteexample.com" with "example.com"
2. Check your existing 301s on the old site and adjust them to directly point to the new site. You want to avoid any instances where a user has to hop through multiple 301s to arrive at a target page.
-
cheers for the advise. a) I'm looking to transfer the value from my old domain to my new one.
The site has over 600 pages, It wouldn't really be ideal for me to put canonical tags on each of the old pages to the relevant new pages. (can this be done automatically?)
B) Yes I was looking for advise on the new site and which domain should be the main ie: the www (I'll go with the www considering my old site directs to the www)
-
P.S. for got b) !! If it's b), I always redirect to the www. page. You can set that in webmaster tools and also do server side redirects.
-
Not 100% sure what you're asking - do you want to a) transfer value from an old domain to a new domain? Or b) do you want to know whether you should redirect non-www. URLs to the www. equivalent?
If it's a), I'd keep the old site live for a couple of months and set up canonical tags on each page and point them towards the most relevant page on the new site. Leave that to sink in for a couple of months, then I'd 301 pages on the old site to the new site (to the same pages you'd pointed them at with the canonical tag). Leave the 301s in place for at least 180 days, after that you can kill the old site altogether.
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
-
Redirects
Hello, i would like to ask which is the best redirect to use in a website now i have all my links to go to https://www.anavasis.gr Which is the best between: https://www.anavasis.gr https://anavasis.gr https://www.anavasis.gr/index.php https://anavasis.gr/index.php thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | anavasis0 -
Is there a tool to see all redirects?
I'm thinking this is a silly question, but I've never had to deal with it I thought I'd ask. Ok is there a tool out there that will show all the redirects to a domain. I'm working on a project that I keep stumbling on urls that redirect to the site I'm studying. They don't show up in Open Site or ahrefs as linking domains, but they keep popping up on me. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Importance of 301 Redirects
Hello, I have been brought in at the last minute to consult for an e-commerce client who is about to relaunch their website. The site currently receives 8000 visits a month, 3100 of which are from organic search. They have a few thousand product pages. The web development firm they are using is changing all of the old product page urls and using 'search engine friendly' urls for the new site, which is expected to launch in a few weeks. However, they did not/are not planning on including 301 redirects from the old URLs. Other than simply stating 'this will be bad for your SEO', what would be a correct way of explaining to the client how much of a problem it will be if their new site launches without 301s. For example, is this a big enough issue to delay the launch of the site / get in a contract dispute with the web developer?
Technical SEO | | stageagent0 -
Confused on footer links (Which are best practices for footer links on other websites?)
Hello folks, We are eCommerce web design and Development Company and we give do follow links of our website to every projects which we have done with specific keywords. So now the concern is we are seeing huge amount of back-links are being generated from single root domain for particular keyword in webmaster tools. So what should be the best way to practice this? Should we give no follow attribute to it or can use our company logo with link? LtMjHER.png
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
301 redirect of a subdirectory
Hello! I am working on a website with the following structure: example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. The page "example.com/sub1" does not exist (I know this is not the optimal architecture to have this be a nonexistent page). But someone might type that address, so I would like it to redirect it to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. I tried the following redirect: redirect 301 /sub1 http://example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. But with this redirect in place, if I go to example.com/sub1, I get redirected to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3/sub2/sub3 (the redirect just inserts extra subdirectories). If someone types "example.com/sub1" into a browser, I would "example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3" to come up. Is this possible? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
301 redirect all 404 pages
Hi I would like to have a second opinion on this. I am working on an ecommerce website that they 301 redirect all 404 pages (including the URLs entered incorrectly) to the “All categories page”. Will this have any negative SEO impact?
Technical SEO | | iThinkMedia0 -
Geo-Redirection
Our client has two almost identical sites targeting: Australia (www.mysite.com.au) Rest of World (www.mysite.com) Currently they have splash page on www.mysite.com asking users to select: Australia Rest of World (redirects to: www.mysite.com/home) I'm thinking they should get rid of slash page and simply auto detect if user on www.mysite.com is based in Australia and serve a message "Do you want to visit our .com.au site. It's not helped by the fact the .com site appears to get served ahead of .com.au iin australia as both sites are hosted in US. Looking to change this! Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | steermoz70 -
Is a 302 redirect the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page?
Hi guys The widely followed SEO best practice is that 301 redirects should be used instead of 302 redirects when it is a permanent redirect that is required. Matt Cutts said last year that 302 redirects should "only" be used for temporary redirects. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more For a site that I am looking at the SEO Moz Crawll Diagnostics tool lists as an issue that the URL / redirects to www.abc.com/Pages/default.aspx with a 302 redirect. On further searching I found that on a Google Support forum (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=276539078ba67f48&hl=en) that a Google Employee had said "For what it's worth, a 302 redirect is the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page (such as from "/" to "/sites/bursa/"). This is one of the few situations where a 302 redirect is preferred over a 301 redirect." Can anyone confirm if it is the case that "a 302 redirect is the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page"? And if so why as I haven't found an explanation. If it is the correct best practice then should redirects of this nature be removed from displaying as issues in the SEO Moz Crawll Diagnostics tool Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | CPU0