Help with steps to take when fixing cannonical url structure?
-
I would like to 301 redirect all the variations of my site to a single url but would like some clarification on some issues. I have always been confused about how to handle cannonicalization and hopefully this can clear it up for me and others.
This particular site is about 1 year old and gets approximately 15k uniques a month in a great niche. I want to make sure I do this correctly as to not hurt my existing rankings which are quite good. Here is is what I am unsure about.
- Basically I should pick the best url structure to redirect all the others to correct? What determines what url is best to redirect all the rest to? is it www.domain.com, http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com?
- Is the best one to redirect to always standard and something I should set up at the beginning of my site? Or is picking the best url to redirect to based on what url starts to rank in google and you then use that one?
- Should I be going through each of my rankings and seeing what url is ranking in google for each page? On this particular site ALL of my urls in google have no www. or http but instead show up in the SE as domain.com or domain.com/inner-page/html. In that case what do I do?
- I know the slow way to do redirects. I use my hostgator account and do it in cpanel and do it one by one. Is there a faster way where I can go and make lots of changes at once? Maybe I can choose all the variations and put in the one I want them all to redirect to?
- After I figure the above out is fixing all of this as simple as redirecting ALL variations to the one I will use moving forward for each page on my site? Then I am done?
Thanks again for the help!
Jake
-
is there a simple code I put somewhere in there?
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]replace "mysite" with the name of your site
do you see on there that he says its important to leave trailing / on folders
Generally speaking a URL that ends in a slash represents a folder. A URL that ends without a slash represents a page or file.
With respect to www or non-www, there is absolutely no preference from a pure SEO perspective. Either way you chose I would use the http:// prefix as it represents the complete URL.
-
Awesome Ryan! Thank you. This kind of stuff is the part I am SO lost about. I bet I would increase my rankings 500% if I could figure out the technical stuff!
Ok just quick clarification.
So there is no "better" version between http:// and http://www.? That is what I thought but on this guide it says that http://www. is best? http://static.seomoz.org/user_files/SEO_Web_Developer_Cheat_Sheet.pdf
I guess to be safe I could do that but I wonder if it really matters?Also do you see on there that he says its important to leave trailing / on folders.
I do know how to access my htaccess file is there a simple code I put somewhere in there? I am going to go with http://
Thanks for the awesome help!
Jake
-
What determines what url is best to redirect all the rest to? is it www.domain.com, http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com?
The "http://" portion is required for a complete URL. "http://www.domain.com" is the same as "www.domain.com". If you omit the "http://" prefix, all major browsers understand your request and will prepend the URL appropriately.
You can choose either the "www" or "non-www" form of the URL to represent your site. It doesn't matter to search engines. What does matter is that you make a choice and remain consistent.
For an existing site, examine the links you have to both URL forms. As a guide, I would recommend choosing the URL format which has the most authorative linking domains.
Is the best one to redirect to always standard and something I should set up at the beginning of my site?
Yes. You should choose before the site begins attracting traffic.
Should I be going through each of my rankings and seeing what url is ranking in google for each page?
You should make one choice for your entire site. It would be a really bad idea to have some pages use the "www" subdomain while others do not. You would be dividing your traffic into two separate domains which you do not want to do.
Use OpenSiteExplorer.org and Google WMT to determine which domain has the most linking authority.
Is there a faster way where I can go and make lots of changes at once?
You can redirect your entire site with a single statement in htaccess. Since you are using cPanel there is probably a "Redirect" application you can use to make this change. I would recommend contacting hostgator and informing them of your wishes. It is very quick and easy for a managed host to make the change for you. If you are not familiar with the process, it is far better to allow them to make the change for you.
Summary: review your backlinks, make your choice, inform hostgator and request them to make the change. After, test the change. If you choose to keep the "www" prefix, try accessing a few pages without the prefix. You should reach the page and see the "www" portion added to the URL. If the process is set up correctly you are 100% done.
Some SEOs may advise you to use canonicals or update your choice in Google/Bing Webmaster Tools. You can do both but once you set the redirect correctly the results will take care of themselves. Expect it can take up to a month for all of your URLs to appear correctly in SERPs. If you update the change in WMT, it will appear faster in SERPs.
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
-
Redirect Chain Issues - Cannot Fix
Hi All My Moz Crawl for my domain brings up 7 redirect chain errors. In each case, the original source is our old website. Strangely, only 7 of the pages show up as having redirect chains, as there are many more examples. We have added redirects from the old pages via the redirection tool in wordpress. The redirects themselves are working as expected. The redirects are from the old website, so the address http://www.oursite.co.uk/example.html to https:www.oursite.co.uk/new-page/ The chain seems to go from the original site and address to https and then onto the new domain. Screenshot link to the Moz Report https://imgur.com/a/eXRSFcD Any assistance here would be greatly appreciated. The hosts says there is nothing wrong with the.htaccess file, but I'm thinking this must be the issue. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ruislip180 -
My site was hacked and spammy URLs were injected that pointed out. The issue was fixed, but GWT is still reporting more of these links.
Excuse me for posting this here, I wasn't having much luck going through GWT support. We recently moved our eCommerce site to a new server and in the process the site was hacked. Spammy URLs were injected in, all of which were pointing outwards to some spammy eCommerce retail stores. I removed ~4,000 of these links, but more continue to pile in. As you can see, there are now over 20,000 of these links. Note that our server support team does not see these links anywhere. I understand that Google doesn't generally view this as a problem. But is that true given my circumstance? I cannot imagine that 20,000 new, senseless 404's can be healthy for my website. If I can't get a good response here, would anyone know of a direct Google support email or number I can use for this issue?
Technical SEO | | jampaper0 -
URL removals
Hello there, I found out that some pages of the site have two different URL's pointing at the same page generating duplicate content, title and description. Is there a way to block one of them? cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
URL Structure for Deal Aggregator
I have a website that aggregates deals from various daily deals site. I originally had all the deals on one page /deals, however I thought that maybe it might be more useful to have several pages e.g. /beautydeals or /hoteldeals. However if I give every section it's own page that means I have either no current deals on the main /deals page or I will have duplicate content. I'm wondering what might be the best approach here? A few of the options that come to mind are: 1. Return to having all the deals on one page /deals and linking internally to content within that page
Technical SEO | | andywozhere
2. Have both a main /deals page with all of the deals plus other pages such as /beautydeals, but add re="canonical" to point to the main /deals page
3. Create new content for the /deals page... however I think people will probably want to see at least some deals straight away, rather than having to click through to another page.
4. Display some sub-categories on the main /deals page, but have separate URLs for other more popular sub-categories e.g. /beautydeals (this is how it works at the moment) I should probably point out that the site also has other content such as events and a directory. Any suggestions on how best to approach this much appreciated! Cheers, Andy0 -
Does Site Structure Affect Google
Hi - I'm pretty new at this. We’re running an e-commerce affiliate site at http://www.mydomain.com. So we don’t take payments but customer gets passed through to third party sites when they select to buy a product. We have a blog at http://www.mydomain.com/news. I think Google is treating these 2 sites as as separate sites for PR. For this reason we're thinking about moving this to http://news.mydomain.com. Anyone have any experience in this?
Technical SEO | | richardjoseph0 -
Mobile Site Domain/URL Structure
We are currently building a mobile optimised version of our main website and I had some questions with regard to SEO. 1. Is it best to structure the domain as: m.yourdomain.com yourdomain/m 2. It is correct to place rel="cannonical" on the mobile pages and to have only the main site indexed? Thanks in advance and links or books on mobile seo you can direct me to that would be greatly appreciated. Phil
Technical SEO | | Phily0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Help! Need advice for a new HTTPS URL!
Hi. We have just launched a new website that is fully secure with the HTTPS url. You can still access the home page with an ordinary HTTP address. That is what we want to change. Should we forward the HTTP url to the HTTPS? Redirect? It is the same URL for both. http://www.parrotmoon.com Thank you for all ideas! Jay
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0