Reducing pages with canonical & redirects
-
We have a site that has a ridiculous number of pages. Its a directory of service providers that is organized by city and sub-category of the vertical. Each provider is on the main city page, then when you click on a category, it will only show those folks who offer that subcategory of this service.
example:
- colorado/denver - main city page
- colorado/denver/subcat1 - subcategory page
There are 37 subcategories. So, 38 pages that essentially have the same content - minus a provider or two - for each city.
There are approx 40K locations in our database. So rough math puts us at 1.5 million results pages, with 97% of those pages being duplicate content!
This is clearly a problem. But many of these obscure pages do rank and get traffic. A fair amount when you aggregate all these pages together.
We are about to go through a redesign and want to consolidate pages so we can reduce the dupe content, get crawl budget allocated to more meaningful pages, etc.
Here's what I'm thinking we should do with this site, and I would love to have your input:
- Canonicalize
Before the redesign use the canonical tag on all the sub-category pages and push all the value from those pages (colorado/denver/subcat1, /subcat2, /subcat3... etc) to the main city page (colorado/denver/subcat1)
- 301 Redirect
On the new site (we're moving to a new CMS) we don't publish the duplicate sub-category pages and do 301 redirects from the sub-category URLs to the main city page urls.
We'd still have the sub-categories (keywords) on-page and use some Javascript filtering to narrow results.
We could cut to the chase and just do the redirects, but would like to use canonicalization as a proof of concept internally at my company that getting rid of these pages is a good thing, or at least wont have a negative impact on traffic. i.e. by the time we are ready to relaunch traffic and value has been transfered to the /state/city page
Trying to create the right plan and build my argument. Any feedback you have will help.
-
Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?
Thanks!
-
The best way is to make sure you're using the tag properly and that you have all your angles covered.
There is actually some good posts on SEOmoz about canonicalization, I'll try and find those for you.
-
awesome feedback! thanks david. would like to hear your thoughts on proper canonicalization when you have a moment. thanks again.
-
Your plan sounds good but here are a few things I'd like to add.
-
Make sure the dupe pages you're getting rid of are not the main traffic sources. If that is the case you'll want to redirect only a few at a time and slowly go around fixing that. You don't want to switch to new CMS, throw up redirects, and lose 85% of your traffic. Just make sure it's not your main traffic source.
-
Make sure you use the proper methods of canonicalization. Don't half-ass it.
-
On the new site, because you have a large and deep site, make sure you have a proper sitemap generated fresh all the time and that the proper weights are assigned and proper structuring. Less levels = better.
-
Watch your Webmaster Tools.
That is all I have, I think you'll be fine.
-
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
-
Does redirecting a duplicate page NOT in Google‘s index pass link juice? (External links not showing in search console)
Hello! We have a powerful page that has been selected by Google as a duplicate page of another page on the site. The duplicate is not indexed by Google, and the referring domains pointing towards that page aren’t recognized by Google in the search console (when looking at the links report). My question is - if we 301 redirect the duplicate page towards the one that Google has selected as canonical, will the link juice be passed to the new page? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lewald10 -
Java redirect harm page authority?
Hello! Our website using JAVA redirect (legal reasons) , I noticed that pages that have JS redirect don't get the same page authority for example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Roi.Bar
The old home page have 60 PA while the new home page get only 22 PA I know that Google don't have problem with JS redirects and they passing all the juice like regular 301
but all SEO tools are straggling to understand it, why? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?0 -
Is there a way to rel = canonical only part of a page?
Hi guys: I'm doing SEO for a boat accessories store, and for instance they have marine AC systems, many of them, and while the part number, number of BTUs, voltage, and accessories change on some models, the description stays exactly the same across the board on many of them...people often search on Google by model number, and I worry that if I put rel = canonical, then the result for that specific model they're looking for won't come up, just the one that everything is being redirected to. (and people do this much more than entering a site nowadays and searching by product model, it's easier). Excuse my ignorance on this stuff, I'm good with link building and content creation, but the behind-the-scenes aspects... not so much: Can I "rel=canonical" only part of the page of the repeat models (the long description)? so people can still search by model number, and reach the model they are looking for? Am I misunderstanding something here about rel=canonical (Interesting thing, I rank very high for these pages with tons of repeat descriptions, number one in many places... but wonder if google attributes a sort of "across the site" penalty for the repeated content... but wouldn't ranking number 1 for these pages mean nothing's wrong?. Thanks)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidCiti1 -
Pagination on a product page with reviews spread out on multiple pages
Our current product pages markup only have the canonical URL on the first page (each page loads more user reviews). Since we don't want to increase load times, we don't currently have a canonical view all product page. Do we need to mark up each subsequent page with its own canonical URL? My understanding was that canonical and rel next prev tags are independent of each other. So that if we mark up the middle pages with a paginated URL, e.g: Product page #1http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2" />**Product page #2 **http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692" />http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3" />Would mean that each canonical page would suggest to google another piece of unique content, which this obviously isn't. Is the PREV NEXT able to "override" the canonical and explain to Googlebot that its part of a series? Wouldn't the canonical then be redundant?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
Pages that 301 redirect to a 404
We are going through a website redesign that involves changing URL's for the pages on our site. Currently all our pages are in the format domain.com/example.html and we are moving to stip off the .html file extension so it would just be domain.com/example We have thousands of pages as the site deals with news so building a redirect for each individual page isn't really feasible. My plan is to have a generic rewrite rule that redirects any page that ends .html to the stripped off version of this. A problem I can see with this is that it will also redirect pages that don't exist. So for example, domain.com/non-existant-page.html would 301 to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. What would the SEO repercussions be for this? Obviously if a page doesn't exist already then it shouldn't show up in the search engine indexes and shouldn't be a problem but I'm a bit worried about how old pages that currently legitimately 404 will be treated when they start to 301 redirect to a 404 instead. Not sure if there any other potential issues from this that I've missed either? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbb0240 -
Do I put a canonical tag on the page I am pointing to?
Lets say B i a duplicate page of A (main page). I understand I have to put canonical tag under B to point to A. Do I also put canonical tag under the main page A? Is it necessary? I understand that A would then tell Google that it is preferred page of A? Is this a correct understanding?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak0 -
Redirecting Canonical 301s and Magento Website
I have an issue with a client's website where it has 3700+ pages, but roughly half of them are duplicates. Thankfully, the only difference between the original and the duplictes is the "?print" at the end of each URL (I suppose this is Magento's way of making a printable page version of the same page. I don't know, I didn't build it.) My questions is, how can I get all the pages like this http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html?print to redirect to pages like this... http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html Also, do they NEED to be Canonical, or will a 301 redirect be sufficient. Also, after having done this, if anybody knows, is there a way I can turn that feature off in Magento, because we're expanding our product line, and I don't want to have to keep chasing after these "?print" pages after the fact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClifThompson0 -
Redirect Chains - Accept the 301 chain or link from the original page??
Hi everyone, I have a client that re-launched his site and it's gone from 100 pages to 1000 (new languages/increased product pages etc) We've used 301's to map the old site to the new database driven site. BUT the new site is creating extremely long URL's: e.g. www.example.com/example_example_example/example_example_example_example Obviously I want to change these URL's: THE PROBLEM..... I am worried about the Chain Redirects. I know two 301 redirects is okay (although it's not great), but I wonder if there is an alternative: When I've implemented the new URL structure the chain will look like this: www.oldsite.com 301 redirects to www.newsitewithdodgyurls.com which then 301 redirects to www.mynewsitewithgreaturls.com Seeing as the new site has only been live for a month, and hasn't really gained many external links, should I: 301 from the original site (www.oldsite.com) straight to the new site (www.mynewsitewithgreaturls.com)? If so, what would I do with the pages that I have not redirected? Let them 404? OR Leave the 301 chain in place? Your advice, and any other suggestions would be much appreciated Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjackson0