Redirect non-www if using canonical url?
-
I have setup my website to use canonical urls on each page to point to the page i wish Google to refer to.
At the moment, my non-www domain name is not redirected to www domain. Is this required if i have setup the canonical urls?
This is the tag i have on my index.php page
rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com.au" />
If i browse to http://mydomain.com.au should the link juice pass to http://www.armourbackups.com.au?
Will this solve duplicate content problems?
Thanks
-
Dan is correct and the biggest reason to redirect the www to non www or non www to www is that the chance will always exist that they will be seen as two sites and by virtue of that you will split the value of the site. We see it every day when we take on new clients. While the DA is the same on both, the PA for a home page or important other ranking page is different. One I just finished sending a proposal on has a DA of 23 for the site. The www version home page has a PA of 32 while the non www version has a PA of 21. There are four links on the non www that do not exist on the www.
So, your call, Dan is right.
Best
-
Hi
A canonical is kind of like a last resort if a redirect can't be used - and best applies to handling campaign URL parameters and session IDs etc. You really ought to redirect all possible variations of the homepage to one singular URL no matter what. This way people will only link to one version of it (or at least be more likely to).
-Dan
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
-
Website url structure after redesign and 301 redirect chains - Looking for advice
OK, been trying to piece together what is best practice for someone I'm working with, so here goes; Website was redesigned, changed urls from url a to url b. 301's put in place. However, the new url structure is not optimal. It's an e-commerce store, and all products are put in the root folder now: www.website.com/product-name A better, more organized url structure would be: www.website.com/category/product-name I think we can all agree on that. However, I'm torn on whether it's worth changing everything again, and how to handle things in terms of redirects. The way I see things, it would result in a redirect chain, which is not great and would reduce link equity. Keeping the products in the root moving forward with a poor structure doesn't feel great either. What to do? Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Tomasvdw0 -
Redirect indexed lightbox URLs?
Hello all, So I'm doing some technical SEO work on a client website and wanted to crowdsource some thoughts and suggestions. Without giving away the website name, here is the situation: The website has a dedicated /resources/ page. The bulk of the Resources are industry definitions, all encapsulated in colored boxes. When you click on the box, the definition opens in a lightbox with its own unique URL (Ex: /resources/?resource=augmented-reality). The information for these colored lightbox definitions is pulled from a normal resources page (Ex: /resources/augmented-reality/). Both of these URLs are indexed, leading to a lot of duplicate indexed content. How would you approach this? **Things to Consider: ** -Website is built on Wordpress with a custom theme.
Technical SEO | | Alces
-I have no idea how to even find settings for the lightbox (will be asking the client today).
-Right now my thought is to simply disallow the lightbox URL in robots.txt and hope Google will stop crawling and eventually drop from the index.
-I've considered adding the main resource page canonical to the lightbox URL, but it appears to be dynamically created and thus there is no place to access (outside of the FTP, I imagine?). I'm most rusty with stuff like this, so figured I'd appeal to the masses for some assistance. Thanks! -Brad0 -
Which Version Url to Use for Canonical Tags and in General for Homepage.
I want to put canonical tags on the homepage of a site. cant figure out the version of URL of the homepage should be with a / at the end or without the / ( www.example.com of www.example.com/ ) if I put into the google the URL with / I get the URL without the / in my browser, and it isn't showing as a redirect in my moz extension or other tools. But when I copy the URL from browser and paste elsewhere it pastes with a / I have two questions 1 - in general how does it work with URLs of homepages - I see this happening with lots of sites? 2 - which URL should I set as the canonical version of my homepage? Thanks so much
Technical SEO | | Ruchy0 -
301 Redirect non existant pages
Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Rel=canonical redirect form sign-up to homepage
hi guys, just an idea- in our product- TrackTest.eu we have couple of authoritative websites linking directly to our Sign-up page. Does it make sense to use rel=canonical on Sign-up page with pointing to the homepage so we will pass some link juice to homepage ? I understand that it is not a use how was canonical designed (it is not duplicated content) and don't want to screw anything. Thanks
Technical SEO | | tracktest.eu0 -
Rel=Canonical on a page with 302 redirection existing
Hi SEOMoz! Can I have the rel=canonical tag on a URL page that has a 302 redirection? Does this harm the search engine friendliness of a content page / website? Thanks! Steve
Technical SEO | | sjcbayona-412180 -
How do I resolve Twin domains? redirect website.com to www.website.com?
I am new to this website. Tried to run a campain and got a warning that website.com resolves to www.website.com which hinders SERP by competing for Keyword indexing!. (website is my domain name) Would appreciate help with this. Thanks. S.H. PS: here is the exact wording of error : We have detected that the domain www.yfvaccine.com and the domain yfvaccine.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here.
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Using a canonical tag to eliminate ID variables?
My research on seomoz has resulted in conflicting ideas regarding the canonical tag. One article says avoid it, the other says embrace it. We have fixed a majority of our architecture problems using redirects for duplicate content, however, when we send out newsletters we still have these pesky tracking ids. I figured out how to remove them from analytics, but am unsure of how this affects our SEO. An example of one of our links is: https://www.quicklearn.com/transcript/?utm_source=news101011&utm_medium=e&utm_campaign=newclass&nlid=news101011&UID=2287 The original url being www.quicklearn.com/transcript/ the custom (non-Google) variables being nlid and uid. Is this a problem? Do I need rel cononical tags on each and every page?
Technical SEO | | QuickLearnTraining0