Redirect 301 or Canonical.
-
Hello all,
I have a page with a long post title and url path name (more than 70 caracters and 115). This page has many visits but I am changing the SEO website structure according to SEOMOz and forums guidelines so: I WILL CREATE A DUPLICATE PAGE WITH THE SAME INFO.
This issue has been marked as an issue in the SEO tools, for long names>70 and url path names>115
My question is which option should I use and you would recommend me?
1. OPTION 1: Ideally I would like to keep the old post, so I should use the canonical tag, but my main concern is if the search engines in terms of SEO, even the canonical has been done, will penalise my SEO as there is still a post with bad SEO optimising, or if this is not the case because I already used the canonical.
2. OPTION 2: Eliminate the post and redirection 301 to the new page to keep the juice.
I would prefer option 1, as I keep both post and page, but only if searchengines do not penalise my SEO as they detect a long post name and url path name.
Thank you verty much,
Antonio
-
No problem Antonio,
Your question in regard earning potential - you are looking an impression model from what you have said - so that all depends on the amount of pageviews you get as this sort of advertising measures CPM cost per thousand impressions.
It also depends on what ad network you choose or whether you are going to try and sell your ad space yourself. CPM Ad Networks have different requirements to sign up with them and they all pay differently.
http://www.earningguys.com/advertisement/15-best-cost-per-impression-cpm-ads-networks/
This article gives some well known CPM Ad Networks that you might want to look into or possibly contact to get an idea about what your site could earn. If you could get an average CPM rate that they pay then you could easily estimate your sites potential income.
What is the engagement like on your site?
-
Thank you Matt, it does make sense!
Matt, I have another question from a different topic that you may help,
Do you have an idea where I can get a website/traffic income estimator according to the page views & unique users in terms of ads-platforms? I mean strictly due to ads prints.
It is just to have a rough idea of what could be the income of a website with 5000 unique visitors per day (assuming no product/service is sold).
In any case thank you very much for the great info provided,
Antonio
-
That is why for peace of mind I would go for a 301 redirect which will pass the majority of link juice in terms of SEO and it will eliminate the old page pointing straight at the new one and telling search engines that your old page has permanently moved to the new URL.
Once search engines catch up they will only index your new page URL and Title which you have optimised eliminating the old unfriendly ones but passing any link juice they have gained at the same time.
Does this make sense?
-
Thank you Matt for the great help,
Yes, I will create a page exactly with the same content than the old post, but with right title and url path names according to best SEO practices.
Matt, what I do not still understand is, if I use the canonical, the content will be still in a post (no good SEO) and in a page (good SEO) but my main concern is if the old post that still exists will penalise my SEO overall as the post is not properly in terms of lengths for names and urls.
Thank you very much Matt!
Antonio
-
If you have used a canonical tag to point to the best version of your page then there shouldn't be an issue in terms of SEO and search engines as you are actually telling the search engine that you have two pages that contain the same information and you would like them to take the one mentioned in the canonical tag as the original. You are actually practising good optimisation and that is the whole reason the canonical tag was introduced to help optimise website structure for search engines.
A quick question - when you create this new page that will have a different URL and Title are you going to be keeping the rest of the content the same? If so I would personally use a 301 redirect to the new URL and make sure that you have changed any internal links such as navigation to the new URL and not the old one. When I have had a situation such as this that is what I have done and it has worked well. It is important when changing your site structure and URLs that you make sure your navigation reflects your new URLs and not the old redirected ones, so you don't give mixed messages to the search engines.
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
-
Subdirectory site / 301 Redirects / Google Search Console
Hi There, I'm a web developer working on an existing WordPress site (Site #1) that has 900 blog posts accessible from this URL structure: www.site-1.com/title-of-the-post We've built a new website for their content (Site #2) and programmatically moved all blog posts to the second website. Here is the URL structure: www.site-1.com/site-2/title-of-the-post Site #1 will remain as a normal company site without a blog, and Site #2 will act as an online content membership platform. The original 900 posts have great link juice that we, of course, would like to maintain. We've already set up 301 redirects that take care of this process. (ie. the original post gets redirected to the same URL slug with '/site-2/' added. My questions: Do you have a recommendation about how to best handle this second website in Google Search Console? Do we submit this second website as an additional property in GSC? (which shares the same top-level-domain as the original) Currently, the sitemap.xml submitted to Google Search Console has all 900 blog posts with the old URLs. Is there any benefit / drawback to submitting another sitemap.xml from the new website which has all the same blog posts at the new URL. Your guidance is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HimalayanInstitute0 -
Redirect Chains
Hi There, I have had conducted a few migrations recently and have a common issue which is this: HTTP (old site) -> HTTPS (old site) -> (HTTPS) (new site) Which causes a redirect chain. How should you prevent this before migration or fix it after migration? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Park Or 301
We main domain is **.com, but we have the other domain by name .ir.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pintapin
So now we want to remove (.ir).
what should we do? ,301? , park domain? Disallow?
Which is better for SEO?0 -
Hacked website - Dealing with 301 redirects and a large .htaccess file
One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking. How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK0 -
Irrelevant backlinks - will 301 redirect cleanse the relationship?
My client has thousands of clients for whom they provided websites that used to reside in a subdirectory of their own domain. They moved them to their own domains but there are tens of thousands of backlinks on those sites pointing back to the original domain. Those backlinks are completely irrelevant and are probably hurting them by sending the wrong signals to Google on what this site really is about. My question is will the 301 redirect be enough to cleanse the relationship between my client and all their clients' sites or should I ask the client to clean up all those backlinks on their clients' sites and remove their domain from the target urls? That's a huge job, obviously.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
301 Redirect how to get those juices flowing
HI Guys Following on from my previous posts i have still not got my rankings back, http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking i am beginning to think that i do have a underlying issue in the site which is restricting me My old site www.economyleasinguk.co.uk was moved to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk, as mentioned the 301 seemed to go really well and all pages updated within 48 hours, however over 5 months on and the juice from the old site is still not pushed over and i hardly rank at all for anything. here are a list of things i have tried 1:Swapped the original 301 which was PHP for an Htaccess 2: added canonical tag to all pages 3: Turned on internal links as per this post by Everett Sizemore http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well number 3 was only done 5 days ago and initially bot traffic was immense, and may need a bit more time to see any results. I still think i have another underlying issue due to the below reasons 1: Page rank on home page is one but inner pages mixture of 1, 2 and 3 sporadically 2: If I copy text from home page no results 3: Open site explorer still has the old site at with a PA of 60 compared to 42 for the new site 4: Checked server logs and Google is visiting old site 5: Header responses are all correct for the canonicals and see no chaining of the 301’s 6: All pages are do follow and no robots restrictions 7: site:has only in the last few days removed the old site from the index naturally it could be that its just a matter of time however 5 months for a 301 is a very long time and 80% traffic loss is immense I would really appreciate it if someone can give the site a once over and see if i have missed anything obvious. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellymandingo0 -
How to Redirect
What is the htaccess code to redirect everything in a directory to a file? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trentc0