Canonical and 301
-
Hi
We have recently restructured our site and 301 redirected some pages. Unfortunately the new page which we 301 to, still had the canonical tags pointing to the old pages. Would this cause google not to index the new pages....?????
-
Hi Jason,
What you have right now is a continous loop. With the canonical tag you are telling Google that the old page is the preferred page you want to show; however, then you have 301 redirecting to the new site. It will only confuse the Google bot and won't help you website at all.
Solution: Remove Canonical Tags from the new pages.
-
I would definitely start by removing the canonical tag. Essentially, you're telling Google that your page is not the preferred version of the page, and that the preferred version doesn't exist.
-
It certainly doesn't help.
You should remove the canonical tag. All it will do is confuse Google.
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 domain name to another site
I had 2 websites. I decided not to maintain one of them and set it to 301 to my main website. However, i see people getting 404 errors when they land on my main website but with a page name from the old site. How can I set things so that anyone who tries to go to the old site goes to my homepage of my main site? http://siteA.com http://oldsiteB.com/oldpagename sends them to http://siteA.com//oldpagename = 404 - I want them to go directly to homepage on siteA.
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0 -
301 redirect homepage question
Hi If i have a homepage which is available at both www.homepage.com and www.homepage.com// should i 301 the // version to the first version. Im curious as to whether slashes are taking into consideration Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
Shutting down a site, where do I 301 it?
I'm working with a few international sites that we are going to collapse into one main site. Our current plan is to 301 the 4 other sites into our main site home page. Is this ok? Is there a better way to do this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Canonical in head best practice
Hi Is putting a list of canonical no follow links in the head the best practice? From SEO Moz analysis urls of duplicate content was flagged but now I have lots of cononicals in the head of my doc and the code looks untidy see head here : http://carpetflooringsdirect.com/ Is there a cleaner way of doing this? and how do I retest to see if I have fixed? Many thanks Matt
Technical SEO | | Matt-J0 -
Canonicalising To A 301?
Hi there, We currently make use of a 301 rule to always return the trailing slash version of any URL on the site. Recently, it seems that the canonical tag was implemented incorrectly. Here's an example: http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes is redirected to http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes/ (trailing slash) However, our canonical tags, across the site, are going to the non-slash version, as follows: I'm right in saying this really damaging? Also, if I instruct the Dev team to implement a site-wide fix by adding the trailing slash in all cases, can I expect any weird side affects on my current rankings/indexation? If so, I can only imagine it being a short-term thing as Google re-aligns it's index of our site? I treat canonical tags with plenty of caution. 😉 Any insights appreciated. Cheers, P.
Technical SEO | | RocketZando0 -
Rel=Canonical
Any downsides to adding the rel=canonical tag to the canonical page itself? It will make it easier for us to implement based on the way our site's templates work. For example, we would add to the page http://www.mysite.com/original-page.aspx The canonical tag would also appear on other dupe pages like: http://www.mysite.com/original-page.aspx?ref=93929299 http://www.mysite.com/original-page.aspx?ref=view29199292 etc
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
301 an old URL with a ? in the URL?
I am redoing a site and the URL's are changing structure. The client's site was in magento and in the store they would get two URLs, for example: /store/categoryname/productname and /store/categoryname/productname?SID=dslkajsfdoiu947598whouieht983hg98 Do I have to 301 redirect both of these URL's to their new counterpart? Both go to the same content but magento seemed to add these SIDs into the navigation and Google has both versions in the index.
Technical SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
REL Canonical Error
In my crawl diagnostics it showing a Rel=Canonical error on almost every page. I'm using wordpress. Is there a default wordpress problem that would cause this?
Technical SEO | | mmaes0