Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
-
Hi,
Newbie alert!
I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly.
The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags.
Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new?
Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case?
Thx in anticipation.
-
The most accurate way is to do it manually. Doing a site:YOURDOMAIN.com in Google will alert you to most of the ugly URLs you want to get rid of.
-
Thanks for that David . . . makes sense.
Can you recommend any tools to help with this job or is it still mostly a manual process?
Cheers.
-
"Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new?"
Any URL's that are indexed should be redirected to the correct version. For example if you have both a database URL and a canonical URL both indexed in search results, then they both should be sent to the correct version.
Also, having only canonical URLs in your submitted sitemaps will help to remove a lot of these, even without redirects.
-
Ok, here is my understanding regarding canonicals and how it works with redirect. 301 redirect means the old URL is shifting its all value and user to the new domain (unlike 302 that only derives traffic but contain the URL value to itself only).
Whereas Canonicals indicates Google the preferred version of the domain so theoretically if you use the canonicals on every page Google should pick the redirected page as 301 will take Google to the final destination anyways…
What will I do?
If Possible, I will map all the redirected URLs and remove canonicals from there just to be on the safe side but I don’t think having there will be much of a difference as Google as at least that smart.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
How to redirect 302 status to 301 status code using wordpress
I just ran the link opportunity option within site explorer and it shows that 31 pages are currently in a 302 status. Should I try to convert the 302's to 301's? And what is the easiest way to do this? I see several wordpress plugins that claim to do 301 redirects but I don't know which to choose. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | vmsolu0 -
301 Redirect How Long until the juice passes through to new site
Hi Guys, Following on from a question i asked last week in regard to a 301 http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking I was thinking that i had some kind of issue on the site, although i have gone over it with a fine tooth comb i cannot find any issue's and from the amount of reads the thread has had im sure if there was something obvious it would have been pointed out. So i am quite confident the 301 from site A to site B is fine and working as intended, so my question is how long should it take until the juice is passed From site A to Site B as its 9 weeks now and still down 85% on traffic and even text for my home page if copied into the search bar don't bring up my site Bing is fine and did not see any real traffic drops but Google is not giving me back the rankings i had prior Whenever i have done a 301 before the rankings pretty steady and i see no real loss in rankings but this time ... painful all changes in WMT made
Technical SEO | | kellymandingo
Canonical tag implemented
all Pages 301 and correct 200 response from the targeted page
Sitemap Updated
Many Links Changed from Old site to new (including DMOZ)
no Robots text Blocking directory's
Google crawling freely and regularly The strange thing is New content is indexed immediately and ranks easily, I added a page for my service in my local area and went straight to position 5 in Google however old existing content wont move, I tracked 150 keywords only 4 are top 75 Don't know what else to do so any advice would be much appreciated PS site is around 17k pages Paul0 -
How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?
Hi All, We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example. Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place. We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs? If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs? Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s? Thanks, all! Chris
Technical SEO | | BaseKit0 -
200 Redirects for SEO instead of 301
We are working with a company on re-platforming our website. On a call yesterday they outlined a strategy to use 200 redirects for our top keywords instead of 301s. I am not familiar with this type of redirect and was wondering if anyone could provide some more insight.
Technical SEO | | EvergladesDirect0 -
Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?
We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr
Technical SEO | | dim_d0