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
-
Trash Domain Or Redirect it (unmaintained)
We have an old website with an old domain that has not been maintained for a few years; it now has a DA of 14 and a spam score of 24%. Our current domain (same business) within a few years has a domain authority of 21 and page authority 29 spam score 1%. (Yes, this domain should have been redirected from the get-go) The question is what do you do with it now? Toss it. Or redirect it. That domain has existed for years but still not sure what its value is from an SEO perspective. I would love to hear your feedback. Is there any benefit to redirect the old domain to the current domain. Or is it a negative and what impact?
Technical SEO | | MyBambooSEO0 -
Glossary Page - best practice
Hi guys, We have a glossary on our website. All terms are accessible via a 'view all' URL, however we also have each letter on their own URL, e.g /a. Currently the rel=canonical tag for all the individual letter pages points to the view all URL. I'm just wondering whether that is best practice or not, as currently not all the individual letter pages are being indexed. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Advice urgently needed on best practice for handling multiple product categories on Magento website
I have an ecommerce site built using Magento and urgently need advice on best practice for handling multiple product categories (where products appear in more than one category on the site creating multiple URLs to the same page). In April this year, based on advice from my SEO who felt that duplicate content issues were causing my rankings to be held back, I changed about 25% of the product categories to 'noindex, follow'. This has made organic traffic fall (obviously) as these pages fell out of Google's index. But, contrary to what I was hoping for, it didn't then improve rankings - not one iota, nothing - which was the ONLY reason why I did this. This has had a real negative impact on sales, so I'm starting to think this was actually an a terrible idea. Should I change them back? And to ask a wider question, what is best practice for this particular scenario?
Technical SEO | | Coraltoes770 -
Server redirect query
Hi there, due to so much traffic coming through to our e-commerce site our host is going to do an apache re-direct for over flow traffic from www.mywebsite.com to a ww2.mywebsite.com canonical tags will be in, but if there is a re-direct this is surely bad for seo, telling on onccasions the page has moved? Any advice on this and the best way to re-direct users when there is too much traffic please let me know.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Mobile redirection
Hi, What would be the best practice for mobile detection: Best practice for redirections Best practice for detection and inclusion of a front-end element inviting to a mobile version of the site I found this on www.W3C.org but it's from 2008 and I was wondering if any of you tried different approaches concerning mobile detection. Thanks! GaB
Technical SEO | | Pherogab0 -
Redirecting According to the occasion
We have loads of different departments that relate to specific occasions (e.g. Christmas, mothers day, father day etc), they all have good PR and inbound links etc and most of them rank well for the specific occasion. What I was thinking is that I could redirect all of the occasions that aren’t in use and send the traffic to the valid occasion live at the moment. So I would 301 all the Christmas pages to our valentine’s day main page. Then once valentines is gone I will redirect Christmas and valentines to the mothers day main page and so on. So this would be constantly switching as different occasions come along. Can you see any possible negative problems? Is there any chance that if I redirect Christmas for example, and then when Christmas comes we remove the redirect, could it harm the Christmas page?
Technical SEO | | steliosp210 -
Best practices for temporary articles
Hello, I would like to have expert inputs about the best way to manage temporary content? In my case, I've a page (ex : mydomain.com/agenda) where I have listing of temporary article, with a lifetime of 1 month to 6 months for some of them. My articles also have a specific url like for ex : mydomain.com/agenda/12-02-2011/thenameofmyarticle/ As you can guess, I got hundreds of 404 😞 I'm already using canonical tag, should I use a in the listing page? I'm a bit lost here..
Technical SEO | | Alexandre_0 -
Best blocking solution for Google
Posting this for Dave SottimanoI Here's the scenario: You've got a set of URLs indexed by Google, and you want them out quickly Once you've managed to remove them, you want to block Googlebot from crawling them again - for whatever reason. Below is a sample of the URLs you want blocked, but you only want to block /beerbottles/ and anything past it: www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/1 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/2 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/3 etc.. To remove the pages from the index should you?: Add the Meta=noindex,follow tag to each URL you want de-indexed Use GWT to help remove the pages Wait for Google to crawl again If that's successful, to block Googlebot from crawling again - should you?: Add this line to Robots.txt: DISALLOW */beerbottles/ Or add this line: DISALLOW: /beerbottles/ "To add the * or not to add the *, that is the question" Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | goodnewscowboy0