301 and Canonical - is using both counterproductive

[ABK717]

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/Product123

To 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.

[AlanMosley]

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.html

so 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.

[ABK717]

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.

[MikeRoberts]

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.

[ABK717]

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.

[MikeRoberts]

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.