Canonical versus 301 for affilaite links
-
Affiliate links for the Volusion ecommerce shops are of the form mydomain.com/?Click=XX where XX is the affiliate ID. Volusion uses rel=canonical to redirect the affiliate links to mydomain.com. Is this a good solution? I used iDevAffiliate for another online store, and their solution was to use 301 redirects to trip off the ? string. Comments?
Best,
Christopher -
No problems Christopher - glad I could help
Andy
-
Thanks, Andy, that was my thinking too. I wanted to confirm before responding to Volusion technical support. Much appreciated.
Best,
Christopher -
Rel canonical is never a guaranteed way to redirect traffic. All this is, is just a signal to give Google to suggest that the rel canonical link should be the preferred one. Google can still ignore this if they wish.
For any redirect, you should always use a 301.
Hope this helps,
Andy
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
-
301 Redirects
Looking for the best way to do the following. Business has changed its name, and has also become a corporate store. The old domain name is now no longer needed as a website page has been created inside the main corporate site. Obviously i dont want to loose all the traffic that we had and want to redirect them but there is a problem, that im unable to redirect the old domain to the new one due to office 365 installed on the hosting platform, and the old emails will need to run for another 6 months. I can remove the old site and put a landing page up, but i still need to redirect all the pages to the new site, and there is approx 50+ of them. My main question is i currently have atleast 50+ redirects already in there due to seo changes over the years, some would go back atleast 5 years, whats a safe amount of time that i can remove the older redirects And am i going about this the right way so i dont loose all the hard work on rankings etc
Technical SEO | | Dunjoko0 -
Rel=canonical or 301 to pass on page authority/juice
I have a large body of product support documentation and there are similar pages for each of versions of the product, with minor changes as the product changes. The two oldest versions of this documentation get the best ranking and are powering Google snippets--however, this content is out of date. The team responsible for the support documentation wants current pages to rank higher. I suggested 301 redirects but they want to maintain the old page content for clients still using the older version of the product. Is there a way to move a page's power to a more updated version of the page, but without wiping out the old content? Considering recommending canonical tags, but I'm not sure this will get me all the way there either as there are some differences between pages, especially as the product has changed over time. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | rachelholdgrafer0 -
Find all old links from a site to 301
We worked on this site a while ago - http://www.electric-heatingsupplies.co.uk/ Whilst we did a big 301 redirect exercise, I wanted to check that we "got" all of them. Is there a historical way I can check all the old indexed links to make sure they correlate to the new links? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
Redirect a 301 Redirect
Does any link juice get passed from a permanent redirect to a new 301 redirect? If so, are there any studies which indicate an estimated percentage?
Technical SEO | | RedCaffeine0 -
301 redirects
Hello. Our site was recently rebuilt, and we switched from using index.php in all the urls to not using it at all. We also changed the names of many of our pages. So the urls have been renamed from "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/". While we were at it, we changed from "_" to "-" as our word separators in the urls. In the .htaccess file, we have a small block of code that strips out "index.php/" from all requests. This code redirects a request for "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/old_page_name/" For your information, the code that strips out "index.php/" is: RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.index.php [NC]
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/uSZWTLna/.
RewriteRule (.?)index.php/(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L] Then we have 301 redirects from "example.com/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/" QUESTION 1: Is this two-step redirect approach okay, or would it be better to skip the separate index.php stripping code and simply have 301 redirects that include "index.php" in the urls? QUESTION 2: Will we lose some of the benefit of the links that have to pass through a 301 redirect? QUESTION 3: We have 50 or so redirects. Will this affect performance of the site? How many redirects does it take to start affecting performance? Thank you!0 -
Remove Links or 301
Howdy Guys, Our main site has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we are just wondering what steps we should now take. For the past 2 months we have been working through our back link profile removing spammy / un-natural links, we have documented everything in a spreadsheet... We recently submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they have now responded saying we still have bad links. I'm just wondering would be it easier just to 301 redirect our site to another TLD we have for our main site? Or Do we keep working through our links 1 by 1 and removing them? Has anyone had any success in 301ing? Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
301 redirect
What is a proper way to redirect any url containing a give word (anywhere in the url) to another sepcified url? Is it like this? RedirectMatch 301 ^thisword$ http://domain.com/newlocation
Technical SEO | | sesertin1 -
What should I do about links coming in that are from link farm type sites?
I just noticed two back links to a couple of sites around pharmaceuticals/attorneys. The one link is to a chinese site with url: http://e.lifestyle.com.cn/fashionweekly/nzj/353093_2.shtml, and the other is to a site called Adroo: http://adroo.com/us/?view=list&list_id=104154&lang=en. Both appear to be some type of link farm sites, one has come in as a nofollow (surprise, you can buy "ads" on their site, both have decent DA. There is no reason for them to link to theses sites, should I find a way to stop the link? Also, on one of the sites we had a dmoz link and it is not showing in OSE? Link is still open in dmoz though. Thanks for any input.
Technical SEO | | RobertFisher0