Home Page Canonical Question

[berglin]

I have an online store through hosting service Volusion. I have asked them about this and was told that this is normal. I would like to confirm this with you guys because I'm not convinced of the quality of their customer service and I'm not an expert.

When I check Analytics the landing page that is visited most often is www....../default.asp and the second most visited is www........./     . These are, of course, both my home page. Volusion has radio button that allows the admin to "enable canonical links", which I have enabled,  and they told me that it is normal to see this on google analytics regardless.

When I type in either of those addreses, the homepage comes up as the address that I typed. In other words it doesn't redirect so that it is always the same.

Am I right to be concerned about this?

[cstinchcombe2]

The 301 Redirect in Volusion only works if the page does not exist. Since /default.asp does exist it doesn't redirect.  Not sure what to do.

[j0a0vargas]

To the home page, you must choose a version and make the 301 redirect for just one option. Using canonical, the home relevance is dividing between several pages, even if google knows what the original content. To concentrate the whole relevance of the home, 301 is the best option.

[KeriMorgret]

Volusion does have the ability to do 301 redirects, so you can set that up to redirect the /default.asp to the / page. I have no experience with Volusion myself, but the following link (and a search on their site for redirects) should get you off on the right foot.

http://support.volusion.com/article/301-redirects

The 301 redirects won't affect your previous GA history, but it will help keep it straight from now on.

Do you have unique page titles for each page? If you can look at landing page by page title that may also help you work around this in an historical sense.

[berglin]

Thank you very much, that makes sense now.

[saibose]

Let me give you an example:

If there are say 3 copies of your webpage

www.domain.com; www.domain.com/index.php; www.domain.com/home.html

Ideally, you would want everyone to land on the 1st option, so here is what you could do.

Activate canonical for the url #2 and #3, in the rel=canonical tag specify the complete URL for the #1 option. That way, even if Google crawls the #2 and #3 URL, it will know that the URL that should be considered is the #1 URL.

rel=canonical does not redirect the page unlike a 302 or 301 redirection where the page is redirected to the URL you want.

[berglin]

Thank you for the quick response. I guess what I'm still not understanding is:

You said, "If you have enabled canonical tag on your URL to redirect the shadow copies of your webpage to 1 location, it should be fine." I am wondering- if the "enable canonical links" feature on my site is working then should I be able to type in www......./ and see www......../ and type in www.......default.asp and see www......default.asp . Shouldn't one of those be redirected so that both show the same address like  www...../ for example?

[saibose]

If you have enabled canonical tag on your URL to redirect the shadow copies of your webpage to 1 location, it should be fine. In the long run however, you should think about getting a 301 redirect to your homepage URL for the URLs that are shadow copies.