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.
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
-
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget).
A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url.
I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site.
We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
-
I know I promised you a crawl and I apologize for the delay I've been so busy lately. But here is something without your domain name on it that gives you an idea of what's going on I will private message you the rest of the information.
when I give you the report it will be in PDF format in addition to all five link you can click on anything with a green arrow or literally pretty much anything on the report to see more.
the amount of redirects you have are to say the least extremely high.
don't worry I have not put your domain in anything that is public.
Again I'm sorry for the delay,
Thomas
-
I have sent you a PM with information that I think you will find valuable. I don't know if you are allowed to continue to send over 1 or 2 PM's a day so feel free to email me at the email address I gave you or tom@tomzickell.com
This Is Definitely Affecting Your Crawl Budget And Having Looked at Your Site I Can Tell You Your Parameters Are a Huge Issue As Well. I Will Have Information for You in A Few Hours.
I will have your crawl finished in a few hours takes that long to actually do it but I gave you enterprise Ahrefs report where you can clearly see what's happening with the 301's is not good.
we need to figure out how many powerful inbound links you have pointing at these product pages if they are receiving two links because they have One and and the Other That Is A Problem. But I Am Assuming That Most of Them Are Not Going to Have This Issue.
You Also Have Two Sitemaps That Is a Negative Big Time.
Here Is a Photograph of That.
Talk to You Soon,
Thomas
-
To respond, I don't think it was an EMD or PMD (partial matching domain) issue as the domain is not relative to any keywords, industry, etc.
If the 301s are removed from these uppercase urls and sites link to them, would the canonical do enough to inform the crawlers to pick up the lowercase version where the canonical tag points to?
Would this cause link juice to be split between the uppercase urls and lowercase urls, or would the canonical take care of that? Note: there are plenty of links going to the uppercase urls because they were in existence for several years.
Thanks for the other suggestions.
-
Your suspicion seem to be warranted since Moz reports that for the July 2013 Panda Update: "The implication was that this was algorithmic and may have "softened" some previous Panda penalties". But on the other hand they state there were ranking fluctuations weeks prior to that, which they called "massive".
So what happened the weeks prior? This article by Moz's own Dr. Peter J Meyers provides a glue but nothing substantial: http://moz.com/blog/googles-multi-week-algorithm-update — it suggests that you may have been of the PMD's (partial match domains) or EMD's (exact match domains) that did not recover from that update. Curiously he also mentions the possibility that these might have been directly targeted.
Possibilities:
- You were directly targeted by Google. In which case your mission is to convince Google that you are now a good citizen. Better internal linking is a stronger sign of becoming non-spammy than going on an external link campaign.
- You were caught in a wider net of EMD's and PMD's that Google calculated to be too spammy and got a temporarily hammered. But adding the 301-s then took away your chance to recover via good internal linking that otherwise may have happened naturally ("blue widget" suggests you may run an e-commerce site). These two have identical results.
What to do:
- Remove 301, keep the canonical URL-s. As Thomas suggested.
- Add or renew internal links thoughtfully (couple of in-context links and related products, top sellers per page) and overview your breadcrumbs (if not already there).
- Add semantic SEO product (or whatever is relevant to you) mark-up, more unique images — everything you consider appropriate to signal to Google that you are not "spammy" anymore.
Just remember, you may no longer rely on your domain name to rank.
-
Hi,
simply by using a canonical tag in the beginning you would have not had to 301 redirect all of your links. Your internal linking structure can become a real issue if you have a lot of 301s creating redirect chains. There are so many variables in this that I honestly want to know more and why you made this change because you said this was before the rollout of Panda so were you doing anything that you thought would be bad?
-
Having a canonical tag with capital letters in the URL
-
as well as the canonical tag tells Google this is not duplicate content this is one URL.
or
I would be happy to do a brief audit on your website and give you the information using deep crawl this would allow me to give you a much more educated answer as to what you can do to fix this issue. However 301 redirecting that many links is not good when you can use a canonical tag. Simply send me a private message if you're uncomfortable posting the URL in the form.
Obviously anyone building a new website do not use capital letters in your URLs. However there are so many variations that the canonical tag tells Google this is the right URL rather it has capital letters in it or not.
Yes it is true that if you're using a Linux server especially having capital letters in your URLs is not preferred when building a site. However for you too 301 redirect all of your URLs or 50% because they are capitalized is way too much.
The canonical tag would have sufficed take care of the issue in an ideal situation obviously you would not create any links that have capital letters in them at all.
Would have been the ideal way of keeping your URLs simply because they have capitals in them does not make them terrible if Google knows which one is supposed to be the correct one.
http://example.com/Blue-Widget
Verse
301 to http://example.com/blue-widget
When Google crawls a website it is going to want the canonical so if you're old links had been written as
I don't know enough about the situation prior however when you think about it how many times can Google pick a different URL if it's in your's XML site map as well as your HTML site map?
the same thing occurs with
Google considers you must choose the correct URL and stick with it "Awesome links don't change".
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- Would fix this
in this case you can use it 301 redirect but you see the variances in all sorts of links this is corrected by picking the one you want and staying with it. If it's the original link I suggest you stick with that.
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development#4e
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
I hope this was of help to you,
Thomas
PS an example of what I was speaking about is right here. The domain name http://www.ras-tech.com CDN is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
I just had a CDN url created it the reason that this is relevant is the CDN has the option to put a canonical tag pointing to the origin server which is www.ras-tech.com but the URL for the CDN currently is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
Go to the waterfall section and you can see that it took this tool to ras-tech.com
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/kNiPW/http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
you can like at the site code and tell there is no CDN routed/ redirected through the site so this URL will take you to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/ this URL http://www.ras-tech.com unless I told it to go to another one using just the canonical.
try going to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/ and I guarantee it takes you to the origin.
-
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
-
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Redirect Search Results to Category Pages
I am planning redirect the search results to it's matching category page to avoid having two indexed pages of essentially the same content. Example http://www.example.com/search/?kw=sunglasses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WizardOfMoz
wil be redirected to
http://www.example.com/category/sunglasses/ Is this a good idea? What are the possible negative effect if I go this route? Thanks.0 -
Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?
Hi there. I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article ) Thanks 🙂 Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Lowercase VS. Uppercase Canonical tags?
Hi MOZ, I was hoping that someone could help shed some light on an issue I'm having with URL structure and the canonical tag. The company I work for is a distributor of electrical products and our E-commerce site is structured so that our URL's (specifically, our product detail page URL's) include a portion (the part #) that is all uppercase (e.g: buy/OEL-Worldwide-Industries/AFW-PG-10-10). The issue is that we have just recently included a canonical tag in all of our product detail pages and the programmer that worked on this project has every canonical tag in lowercase instead of uppercase. Now, in GWT, I'm seeing over 20,000-25,000 "duplicate title tags" or "duplicate descriptions". Is this an issue? Could this issue be resolved by simply changing the canonical tag to reflect the uppercase URL's? I'm not too well versed in canonical tags and would love a little insight. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Geoip redirection, 301 or 302?
Hello all Let me first try to explain what our company does and what it is trying to achieve. Our company has an online store, sells products for 3 different countries, and two languages for each country. Currently we have one site, which is open to all countries, what we are trying to achieve is make 3 different stores for these 3 different countries, so we can have a better control over the prices in each country. We are going to use Geoip to redirect the user to the local store in his country. The suggested new structure is to add sub-folders as following: www.example.com/ca-en
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajarad
www.example.com/ca-fr
www.example.com/us-en
... If a visitor is located outside these 3 countries, then she'll be redirected to the root directory www.example.com/en We can't offer to expand our SEO team to optimize new pages for the local market, it's not the priority for now, the main objective now is to be able to control the prices for different market. so to eliminate the duplicate issue, we'll use canonical tags. Now knowing our objective from the new URL structure, I have two questions: 1- which redirect should we use? 301, 302?
If we choose 301, then which version of the site will get the link juice? (i.e, /ca-en or /us-en?)
if we choose 302, then will the link juice remain in the original links? is it healthy to use 302 for long term redirections? 2- Knowing that Google bots comes from US-IP, does that mean that the other versions of the site won't be crawled (i.e, www.example.com/ca-fr), this is especially important for us as we are using AdWords, and unindexed pages will effect our quality score badly. I'd like to know if you have other account structure in your mind that would be better than this proposed structure. Your help is highly highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.0