Rel - canonical vs 301 redirect
-
I have multiple product pages on my site - what is better for rankings in your experiance?
If I 301 the pages to 1 correct version of the product page - or if I rel caanonical to the one correct page?
-
You should read this http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139066#301
Google seem to prefer 301 re-directs where possible, but in your case it may be much more straight forward to use the canonical tag. It was created pretty much for times where you have variations on a product (such as different colour shoes but otherwise identical, each with a separate page)
-
The Walrus is correct.
- Canonical the pages
- Update your sitemap.xml file to include only the canonical URLs you want Google to index
- Go into your Google Webmaster Tools account under: Site Configuration > Settings > URL Parameters - to help avoid unintentional duplicate content indexing as well
301 is more for obsolete pages that you want to point to new pages so you can retain PR (although 301's still lose a little bit of PR) and also used to avoid any guests from getting a 404 error from bookmarked or links pointing to that page.
-
Hi,
In my experience rel canonical if the product pages have an ID or session identification but are the same pages.
I only do 301 if the pages have different content os something like that.
Bye!
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
-
301 Redirect Review Nodes
I have a client who rents out vacation beach rentals. They currently have thousands of homes under management. Each property has its own internal reviewing platform. Reviews are not really intended to be viewed on their own, as in a stand alone page with just the review on it. The problem is that Drupal makes just about every type of node viewable on its own dedicated URL. I was just thinking about taking request to view stand alone reviews and 301’ing them to their respective property page, the context in which they are intended to be viewed. The website has about 2500 review nodes currently crawlable via Drupal that sit on their own URLs. Would there be a material impact to 301 them to their respective property page when any attempt to view them on their own is made to the site?
Technical SEO | | conversionpipeline20 -
Selective 301 redirections of pages within folders
Redirection Puzzle - it's got me puzzled anyhow! The finished website has just been converted from an old aspx affair to a wordpress site. Some directory structures have changed significantly; there appears to be a load of older medical articles that have not been added back in and it sounds unlikely that they will be. Therefore unmatched old news articles need to be pointed to the top news page to keep hold of any link value they may have accrued. The htaccess file starts with ithemes security's code, Followed by the main wordpress block and I have added the user redirects to the final section of the htaccess file . I have been through the redirects and rewrites line by line to verify them and the following sections are giving me problems. This is probably just my aging brain failing to grasp basic logic. If I can tap into anybody's wisdom for a bit of help I would appreciate it. My eyes and brain are gone to jelly. I have used htaccesscheck.com to check out the underlying syntax and ironed out the basic errors that I had previously missed. The bulk of the redirects are working correctly. #Here there are some very long media URLs which are absent on the new site and I am simply redirecting visiting spiders to the page that will hold media in future. Media items refuse to redirect
Technical SEO | | TomVolpe
Line 408 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Rich%20Media%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ Line 409 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Quicktime%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.m4v http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ Line 410 redirect 301 /Professionals/Biomedicalforum/Recordedfora/Mp3%20http:/kplayer.kcl.ac.uk/ess/echo/presentation/15885525-ff02-4ab2-b0b9-9ba9d97ca266/media.mp3 http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/biomedical-forum/recorded-fora/ #Old site pagination URLs redirected to new "news" top level page - Here I am simply pointing all the pagination URLs for the news section, that were indexed, to the main news page. These work but append the pagination code on to the new visible URL. Have I got the syntax correct in this version of the lines to suppress the appended garbage? RewriteRule ^/LatestNews.aspx(?:.*) http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/? [R=301,L] #On the old site many news directories (blog effectively) contained articles that are unmatched on the new site, have been redirected to new top level news (blog) page: In this section I became confused about whether to use Redirect Match or RewriteRule to point the articles in each year directory back to the top level news page. When I have added a redirectmatch command - it has been disabling the whole site! Despite my syntax check telling me it is syntactically correct. Currently I'm getting a 404 for any of the old URLs in these year by year directories, instead of a successful redirect. I suspect Regex lingo is not clicking for me 😉 My logic here was rewrite any aspx file in the directory to the latest news page at the top. This is my latest attempt to rectify the fault. Am I nearer with my syntax or my logic? The actual URLs and paths have been substituted, but the structure is the same). So what I believe I have set up is: in an earlier section; News posts that have been recreated in the new site are redirected 1 - 1 and they are working successfully. If a matching URL is not found, when the parsing of the file reaches the line for the 1934 directory it should read any remaining .aspx URL request and rewrite it to the latest news page as a 301 and stop processing this block of commands. The subsequent commands in this block repeat the process for the other year groups of posts. Clearly I am failing to comprehend something and illumination would be gratefully received. RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1934/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1933 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1933/(.*).aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1932 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1932/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1931 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1931/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] #------Old site 1930 unmatched articles redirected to new news top level page RewriteRule ^/Blab/Blabbitall/1930/(.*)/.aspx http://www.SITENAME.ac.uk/news-events/latest-news/ [R=301,L] Many thanks if anyone can help me understand the logic at work here.0 -
301 redirect file question
Hi Everyone, I am creating a list of 301 redirects to give to a developer to put into Magento. I used Screaming Frog to crawl the site, but I have noticed that all of their urls 302 to another page. I am wondering if I should 301 the first URL to the url on the new site, or the second. I am thinking the first, but would love some confirmation. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | mrbobland0 -
301 redirect + new website copy
Hi There, We are currently redeveloping our website and we're rewriting and optimising our many of our service pages. I think I may already know the answer but should we apply 301 redirects from our old services pages to the new versions? The content subject matter will be the same on the new versions, they will just be completely reworded. I would be interested to hear your views. Thanks, Stu
Technical SEO | | Stuart260 -
Help with 301 redirect code
Hi, I can't work out how to make this one work and would apreciate if someone could help.
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
i have a series of folders from a old site that are in the structure:
/c/123456/bags.html (the "123456" changes and is any series of 6 digit numbers), and the "bags.html" changes depending on the product.
I need that to be 301 redirected to the following format:
/default/bags/bags.html0 -
How to know what pages are 301 redirecting to me?
Hi! It is easy to know if somebody is spam linking your website, looking i.e., looking at open site explorer to analyse the links profile. But, is it possible to know if a competitor of mine is redirecting a bad domain to main with a 301 redirect, thus transfering any bad SEO reputation to me? Best Regards, Daniel
Technical SEO | | te_c0 -
Combining 2 blogs into one. What is quicker, easier and better - rel canonical or an htaccess/ 301?
The objective I have is to archive an entire blog (which I no longer have time to keep up) with multiple posts over 4years , into another blog as a a folder. My question: would it be quicker and easier to do a rel canonical, or separately list all pages in htaccess and do a 301 redirect.
Technical SEO | | charlesgrimm0 -
301 redirect problems on site not yet moved
I have re-designed one of my sites, the old site is all static pages on a Windows server, I have made the new sites and it is on a new server and is running on Wordpress. I have just finished testing it and so am nearly ready to switch over the nameservers to the new server, however I'm having some problems with 301 redirects. I have tried to set up a few 301 redirects on the new server to test before I change nameservers but they don't appear to be working. I would have imagined that they should (even though the actual page isn't hosted on the new server) or am I being very stupid here and I can't test a 301 redirect until the nameservers have been changed. Redirect 301 /magazines.htm http://.../~account/magazine-freebies Obviously the above with the stars (*) is the server address and route to my account.
Technical SEO | | Wardy0