301 and Canonical - is using both counterproductive
-
A site lost a great deal of traffic in July, which appears to be from an algorithmic penalty, and hasn't recovered yet. It appears several updates were made to their system just before the drop in organic results. One of the issues noticed was that both uppercase and lowercase urls existed. Example urls are:
www.domain.com/product123
www.domain.com/Product123To clean this up, a 301 redirect was implemented a few months ago.
Another issue found was that many product related urls had a parameter added to the url for a tracking purpose. To clean this up, the tracking parameters were removed from the system and a canonical tag was implemented as these pages were also found in Google's index. The tag forced a page such as www.domain.com/product123?ref=topnav to be picked up as www.domain.com/product123.
So now, there is a 301 to address the upper and lowercase urls and a canonical tag to address the parameters from creating more unnecessary urls.
A few questions here:
-Is this redunant and can cause confusion to the serps to have both a canonical and 301 redirect on the same page?
-Both the 301 and canonical tag were implemented several months ago, yet Google's index is still showing them. Do these have to be manually removed with GWT individually since they are not in a subfolder or directory?
Looking forward to your opinions.
-
I think the point is,
mydomain.com/Page.html 301's to mydomain.com/page.html
but mydomain.com/page.html?x=y canonicals to mydomain.com/page.htmlso in this case both have a function.
but having said that I would fix the links to mydomain.com/Page.html as using a 301 leaks link juice, they are good when correcting a external link, but an internal link should be fixed by fixing the link itself.
-
That's correct. A 301 was placed to point to the lowercase urls, and then a canonical tag on the same page to try to clean out the parameters in the URL.
-
Just because I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly or because its Friday & my brain is misfiring... Did you place a canonical on www.domain.com/Product123 pointing at the lowercase AND then 301 redirect it to the lowercase? Because if that's the case then it would really only pick up the 301.
-
Mike,
To answer your question above, the product url without parameters (i.e. www.domain.com/product123) should be what the SERPs pick up. The parameters that were there for a short period are no longer there and haven't been. I've also heard that in time, the crawlers will notice it and index correctly. But, 3 months after canonical tags were implemented and still no updates from what the index had as they are still being shown.
Also, a tool was used to show what crawling the site would look like to a spider. The uppercase urls (i.e. www.domain.com/Product123) have the 301 redirect being picked up. However, the canonical tag didn't seem to be picked up according to the tool. On other pages of the site where the canonical tag was implemented, without the 301, the tool shows detection which is what led me to this post.
-
They can be used together in this fashion without any problems. The 301 is redirecting duplicate content that does not need to physically exist and is better served by another page. The Canonical "redirects" the bots from a page that needs to exist for a specific purpose (tracking tag, model id, product id, etc.) but which is a duplicate or subset of another page that should be given the proper ranking signals in place of the page with the variable.
Edit: As to the second question, don't worry. They will naturally change over to the correct page(s) over time as long as Google chooses to follow the canonical tag and consider the page it is pointing to as proper/relevant. In the meantime, the 301s will bring people to the proper place and the canonicals should be passing signals/equity to the proper pages.
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
-
Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google. The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way). So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible... What would be your recommendation on this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ostesmorbrod0 -
Pagination Tag and Canonical
Once and for all - I would really like to get a few opinions regarding what is the best method working for you. For most of the all timers in here there's no need to introduce the pagination tag. The big question for me is regarding the canonical tag in those case. There are 2 options, as far as I consider: Options 1 will be implementing canonical tag directing to the main category page: For instance: example.com/shoes example.com/shoes?page=2 example.com/shoes?page=3 In this case all the three URL's will direct to the main category which is example.com/shoes Option 2 - using self-referral canonical for every page. In this case - example.com/shoes?page=2 will direct its canonical tag to example.com/shoes?page=2 and so on. What's the logic behind this? To make sure there are no floating pages onsite. If I'll use canonical that directs to the main category (option 1) then these pages won't get indexed and techniclly there won't be any indexed links to these pages. Your opinion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoperad0 -
301 redirect to a temporary URL
Hi there, What would happen if I redirected a set of URLs to a temporary URL structure. And then a few weeks later redirected the original URLs and temporary URLs to the final permanent URLs? So for example:A -> B for a few weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sichristie
then: A->C and B->C where:
C is the final destination URL.
B is the temporary destination
A is the original URL. The reason we are doing this is the naming of the URLs and pages are different, and we wish to transition our customers carefully from old to new. I am looking for a pure technical response.
Would we lose link juice? Does Google care if we permanently redirect to a set of 'temporary' URLs, and then permanently redirect to a set of what we think are permanent URLs? Cheers, Simon0 -
Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site. Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point) It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages. love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
How canonical url harm our website???
Even though my website has no similar/copied content, i used rel=canonical for all my website pages. Is Google or yahoo make any harm to my SERP's?? EX: http://www.seomoz.org is my site, in that i used canonical as rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.seomoz.org" to my home page like that similar to all pages, i created rel=canonical. Is search engine harm my website???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MadhukarSV0 -
Where to point Rel = Canonical?
I have a client who is using the rel=canonical tag across their e-commerce site. Here is an example of how it is set up. URLs 1. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.do?nType=22. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.doThe canonical tag points to the second URL. Both pages are indexed by Google.The first page has a higher page authority (most of the internal site links go to the first URL) than the second one. Should the page with the highest authority be the one that the canonical tag points to? Is there a better way to handle these situations? Does any authority get passed through the tag?Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Canonical tag question
Suppose a site has two pages ( Page A ) and Page B. Both of them have pagerank, but duplicate content. The page A is ranked for keyword "seo india" and page B is ranked for keyword "seo services". If i implement canonical tag on page B, does 1. The pagerank of page B will be transfered to Page A ? 2. Does the site A now ranks for keyword "seo servicies " ( for which Page B was ranking earlier )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Canonical & noindex? Use together
For duplicate pages created by the "print" function, seomoz says its better to use noindex (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not) and JohnMu says its better to use canonical http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6c18b666a552585d&hl=en What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1