Canonical / 301 Redundancy
-
Suppose I have two dynamic URLs that lead to the identical page:
www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1
and
www.example.com/product.php?y=1
The x=1 parameter had some historical meaning, but is now unused. All references to the x=1 parameter have been removed from internal links and sitemaps.
I have implemented two solutions:
First, the header of www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1 includes:
Second, the .htaccess file includes the following:
Redirect permanent /product.php?x=1&y=1 http://www.example.com/product.php?y=1
Questions:
1. I assume that since canonical is still relatively new, it's best to play it safe and implement both solutions. Is this correct?
2. When I point my browser to www.example.com/product.php?x=1&y=1, it does NOT redirect to www.example.com/product.php?y=1. The address bar continues to show the non-canonical URL. Is this because the canonical tag somehow takes precedence over the 301 redirect?
3. How long will Google Webmaster Tools continue to show these as duplicates, even though I've implemeted BOTH canonical and 301? It's been a few weeks and I thought it would have rolled off by now.
Thanks!
-
Note to self, and to others who see this thread later, the 301 for this situation is:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} x=([0-9]+)&y=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^product.php$ http://www.example.com/product.php?y=%2 [r=301,nc]
-
Dr. Pete,
Thanks for the very helpful answer. I've gotten rid of the rel-canonical tag for this part of the site and I'll try to figure out what's up with the 301s.
BTW, I listened to the recorded version of your "future proofing" webinar this morning and learned a lot.
Akira
-
(1) Honestly, I tend not to double-up, if for no other reason that you can't really tell what's work and what isn't. Keep in mind, too, that these tools do have different purposes. 301-redirects impact everyone (users and bots), whereas rel-canonical is only for search. If a 301 is appropriate, then just use a 301.
(2) If the address bar isn't changing, your 301-redirect isn't working. Test it with a header checker:
http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/
A rel-canonical tag will not override browser behavior (at least, not at this point in time).
(3) It can take weeks to clear, and it sounds like your 301 isn't working right, so that's going to exacerbate the problem. The page has to re-crawl and re-cache, and GWT may still show the message for a couple of weeks after that.
Personally, I'd drop the canonical and fix the 301-redirect.
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
-
Page auto directing to /#/id0 but no 301 in place?
I'm a little perplexed and hope someone technically savvy can help. Wordpress site. Our page: www.curveball-media.co.uk/animation Redirects to: www.curveball-media.co.uk/animation/#/id0 I cannot see any reason for this. No 301s, nothing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
Canonical tags for duplicate listings
Hi there, We are restructuring a website. The website originally lists jobs that will have duplicate content. We have tried to ask the client not to use duplicates but apparently their industry is not something they can control. The recommendations I had is to have categories (which will have the idea description for a group of jobs), and the job listing pages. The job listing pages will then have canonical tags pointing to the category page as the primary URL to be indexed. Another opinion came from a third party that this can be seen as if we are tricking Google and would get penalised, **Is that even true? **Why would Google penalise for this if thats their recommendations in the first place? This third party suggested using nofollow on the links to these listings, or even not not index them all together. What are your thoughts? Thanks Issa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Multilingual Site and 301 redirection
Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Should we NOINDEX NOFOLLOW canonical pages?
Hi, I was window shopping at Gemvara and noticed something interesting... They rank very high for long-tail phrases such as "rose gold engagement rings" and in their pagination pages for that category not only they filled canonical to the main category page (which is logic) but also they "NOINDEX NOFOLLOW" the pages... Is that recommended? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
301 vs 302
We recently launched a redesign and I noticed from running a crawl using Screaming Frog SEO that our redirects are all being seen as 302. I know 302 is a temporary redirect, but does this hurt SEO rankings when all our redirects are being seen as 302s instead of 301s? Also, the way I implemented the redirects was by using the IIS Manager Tool. Is it possible that our IIS Manager Tool is not configured properly and instead of adding the redirect as 301, it is inserting it into the rewrite file as 302s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec0 -
Is this structure valid for a canonical tag?
Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Choose of destination for a 301 redirection
Hi, I had a website paris-football.com which ranked quite well on specific request as 'paris football" and "paris foot". I decided 2 months ago to stop this website as I had no time to update it and it was quite rubish in terms of content and make a redirection to a better quality website. I decided to redirect to the deep url http://www.sportytrader.com/paris-foot.php . The destination Url has not beneft from the redirection and has even seen its rankings drop since the redirection. do you think that it would have been better to redirect to the Home Page http://www.sportytrader.com ? Do you think that I can still change the destination url ? Thanks a lot for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarnac0 -
Is having a canonical tag for the link that IS the canonical a negative thing?
Throughout our site, canonical tags have been added where needed. However, the canonical tags are also included for the canonical itself. For example, for www.askaquestion.com, the canonical tag has been added as www.askaquestion.com. Will this have a negative impact or does it not really matter whether there is such a loop?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0