301 to Intermediate Page then Rel=Canonical from Intermediate to target page
-
Hi
I'm working on an eCommerce site and don't have direct access to the CMS. I had requested developers to provide me a facilty to 301 via htaccess however this is working slight differently. I need guidance from experts whether it's okay or not:
Old Page: example.com/old
Target New Page: example.com/new
After Implementing the redirect, It redirects to an intermediate page or in other words, The same target URL with a question mark added:
example.com/new? (notice the question mark in the new URL)
This intermediate page has a canonical tag for the exact target URL.
So,
if I 301 redirect example.com/old
to example.com/new? (Intermediate page)
and If the intermediate page example.com/new? has a canonical tag for the exact target URL (example.com/new), Will I be able to pass the link juice and authority of old page to the new page?
-
Sorry - I got an email that you left a response, but then it was gone(?) Might be a system glitch. Could you reply again?
-
It's not ideal. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to guess how Google will interpret that, and it can vary a lot with the situation. In theory, a 301+canonical could work like a chained 301-redirect. A two-link 301 chain isn't great, but it's not awful, and it will pass some link-juice. A 301+canonical is probably slightly worse, in practice, I doubt the outcome is consistent across sites.
Keep in mind, too, that a 301 lands the user on a new URL, whereas a canonical doesn't. So, this could cause more people to link to the intermediate page, bookmark it, etc. (also not ideal).
I'm curious - why can you set up a 301 to an intermediate page but no to the target page. It seems like you'd need more CMS access to do what you did then solve the original problem.
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
-
Home page cannibal
I was wondering if others had the same problem I have. It appears Google loves that home page too much and I'm having a difficult time getting it to rank the page I really want. And that happens if a keyword I want to rank for only appears on the home page one time with a keyword density of .1%. Take vanillaqueen.com for example. The home page ranks on the first page for "bulk vanilla beans" and not http://vanillaqueen.com/shop/category/vanilla-beans/ or http://vanillaqueen.com/five-reasons-why-buying-bulk-vanilla-makes-good-sense/ And I'll add another one that I recently took on. This is a personal injury attorney in a large city so there is a ton of competition who have been doing SEO for a very long time. (Fortunately he also does business and civil litigation law to keep the business going). Last month, according to webmaster tools, he got a couple of clicks (hey, it's something!) on "personal injury attorney [his city]" on page 2 in the SERPS, but it was his home page. http://bit.ly/1Gvumlm **In this case I don't mind people landing on the home page, but does the fact that another page that is much better optimized for those keywords indicate a penalty on that page? And is his rank lower because the better page is not ranking and Google has to find the next best thing in the home page? ** Has anyone else experienced that and what have you done to get Google to not go home? P.S. The law site is a huge challenge because of the competition. Any help you pros out there can offer to get this underdog out of hiding will be much appreciated. We're starting a smart, strategic content marketing plan now that I'm very excited about.
On-Page Optimization | | katandmouse1 -
PAGE TİTLE
<title> </span>Home to home moving 4356 <span></title> page A <title> </span>Home to home moving 3723 <span></title> page B These two titles are the same?
On-Page Optimization | | iskq0 -
Search Pages outranking Product Pages
A lot of the results seen in the search engines for our site are pages from our search results on our site, i.e. Widgets | Search Results This has happened over time and wasn't intentional, but in many cases we see our search results pages appearing over our actual product pages in search, which isn't ideal. Simply blocking indexing of these pages via robots wouldn't be ideal, at least all at once as we would have that period of time where those Search Results pages would be offline and our product pages would still be at the back of ranking. Any ideas on a strategy to replace these Search Results with the actual products in a way that won't hurt us too bad during the transition? Or a way to make the actual product pages rank above the search results? Currently, it is often the opposite. Thanks! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Why are some of page indexed and others not
I have created a site structure like this: domain/for-sale/brand domain/for-sale/brand-model domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg1 domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg2 domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg3 etc.... I cannot understand why the domain/for-sale/brand-model does not seem to be indexed, yet the domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg6 is? This is a new site, but I cannot understand why this URL would be indexed without the others... Any ideas? My home pages has links to the domain/for-sale/brand, this page has links to domain/for-sale/brand-model1, domain/for-sale/brand-model2 etc, each of these pages have links to domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg1, domain/for-sale/brand-model/pg2 etc...
On-Page Optimization | | MirandaP0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Duplicate Page Title
Hi All, I'm new in SEOMoz and have some questions after I have already spend 2-3 days trying to resolve the problems identified from Crawling one of my clients websites. I get quite a lot of Duplicate Page Conntent and Page Titles warnings and trying to find a workaround through the forums and posts. I continuously get this error on most of my pages: URL: http://domain.com/benefits with the same Page but with a WWW in front URL: http://www.domain.com/benefits Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks, Athos
On-Page Optimization | | athosk0 -
Multiple silos/products/landing pages. How to design the root page for conversion?
Hi everyone, First post. Tried a few awkward searches on the topic but I must be using bad keywords. I'm re-designing a site that has multiple products and matching multiple audiences. This means we have multiple sillos for multiple groups of keywords with the supporting pages for each silo landing page. Currently I'm working on updating the look and text of those landing pages for each silo to increase conversion. This leaves me with the root web page. We get quite a lot of search traffic from people searching our brand name - so this results in clicks straight through to our root domain. There are no product specific landing pages because it could be any one of the 3-5 different personas we have hitting the site from that source. Does anyone have any good examples of where a site has had multiple products and needed to segregate their audience on a root top page? I'd like to see some examples and hear peoples thoughts. At the moment I'm thinking I need to fill that page up with trust factors as to why people should use us as a company, along with navigational elements in relation to each and every product so they can click through to the proper landing page. The main way I can see on executing that is to have a rotating banner with the same tag line "this is what we do" but be alternating between banners relating to each product.. with their own click through button to go to the respective landing page. Thoughts anyone? Example of sites doing this well?
On-Page Optimization | | specific0 -
Optimally, how many times should the key word or phrase you are targeting for a particular page be mentioned or appear on that page?
Our marketing team is debating how many times the key phrase on each of our web store's product pages should include the word/phrase we are trying to be competitive with. Can you advise?
On-Page Optimization | | Glynlyon0