Canconical tag on site with multiple URL links but only one set of pages

[Eff-Commerce]

We have a site www.mezfloor.com which has a number of Url's pointing at one site.  As the url's have been in use for many years there are links from many sources include good old fashioned hard copy advertising.  We have now decided that it would be better to try to start porting all sources to the .co.uk version and get that listing as the prime/master site.

A couple of days ago I went through and used canonical tags on all the pages thinking that would set the priority and that would also strengthen the page in terms of trust due to the reduced duplication.  However when I went to scan the site in MOZ the warning that the page redirects came up and I am beginning to think that I need to remove all these canonical tags so that search engines do not get into a confused spiral where we loose the little page rank we have.

Is there a way that I can redirect everything except the target URL without setting up a separate master site just for all the other pages to point at.

[Linda-Vassily]

Yes, it is good when there is a clear Google guideline to follow. I'm happy for your quick win!

[Eff-Commerce]

Thanks

I am pleased I do not have to go through the whole site again and even more pleased as I have a number of other sites to work on.These could certainly do with a bit of a boost and this is a quick win.

[Linda-Vassily]

So you want to put a canonical of www.b.co.uk/index.html on a page that can be reached via www.b.co.uk/index.html and you are worried that it will become a loop?

Don't worry. Google specifically thought about the possibility that people might use self-referential canonicals (SEO plugins do it all the time) and engineered it so that this does not cause a loop. (See Matt Cutts on the topic.)

I myself inherited some ugly urls for which I made nice user-friendly aliases and I tagged those pages with the friendly canonical. There were no problems and the pages started doing much better. (In my case it was not cross-domain, but cross-domain canonicals are supposedly supported and in fact I have succesfully used them in other situations.)

[Eff-Commerce]

Hi thanks for the response

The issue is we have one set of pages on a server which is addressed through several different url's.

I never got involved in the server side of things so I do not know if that was by redirects at the route URL.  Just maybe I am trying to add canonical links that just are not required.

If I have www.a.co.uk/index.html, www.a.com/index.html, www.b.co.uk/index.html and want them all to point to www.b.co.uk/index.html. As index.html is on the server once then my thought was that I should have a canonical link to that page from within that page with the www.b.co.uk/index.html as the route.  This may be right or wrong but there is the risk that a spider stops when it gets to the link and goes to the start of the same page, again and again in a loop.

You are of course right that the Google bot should be OK with this but the Moz bot stopped in its tracks and asked if I wanted the page indexed so I had to do this manually.

Gut feel says I should remove the links for now but need to understand what we did server side. Gut feel maybe wrong and I would prefer to do the right thing!

[GPainter]

Okay you lost me a little but let me see If I can help.

First off the canonical tag - Its fantastic for duplicate content (even across other sites) now so good if you don't have duplicate content.

301's - It's very similar to above can work well with duplicate content but not essential. Now you can 301 a few pages into one page so if a user types a URL in (or even has it as a bookmark etc.) the will land on the page you want. its normally a good idea to 301 into similar pages to you don't get users thinking they are going to buy (e.g.) a pair of boots and land on a page about t-shirts.

Google getting lost - Don't worry about Google getting lost, if a user can get around so can Google, plan plan and plan again if you plan it all out (you can even draw flow diagrams) so you know where its all going to and from until you are happy.  You can also get someone who doesn't know your site to test it see if they get lost.

Hope that background helps a bit, you lost me here-

"Is there a way that I can redirect everything except the target URL without setting up a separate master site just for all the other pages to point at."

Why can't you redirect all your pages to the target URL ?

One helpful tool I recommend is screaming frog it can help you pick up redirects 404 etc.