Canonicals & 301 Redirects to new Domain
-
We will be changing our domain name soon and I want to make sure I'm not painting myself into a corner. Of course, I want to transfer as much link equity as possible.
Question #1: Do I need to define a canonical from the old domain to the new domain?
Question #2: Do I also need to put 301s in place on the pages with link equity, or is there a way to apply 301s across the entire site on all pages?
Any input would be appreciated greatly!
Thanks!
-
You will want to do the 301 redirect. That is the best way to address a domain name change. You would use a canonical tag if you were keeping both sites live, which isn't best practice. The canonical tag is not necessary when you use the 301 redirect. You will use the canonical tag to set the correct version of your URL, for example, if your set version is abcde.com and not www.abcde.com you will add a canonical tag to the page for abcde.com.
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
-
Canonical vs 301 for index.php
Hello, we found recently quite a big error our index.php file had no canonical tag nor was a 301 redirect. So we put a canonical tag to it that it's the main www.examle.com duplicate . Now is there any difference in regards to link juice or Google 301 vs canonical tag ? I read that moz did a 301 from their index php. I understand one difference is that user then can Type in the URL if no 301, but I'm interested about ranking effect of it.
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
301 Redirects
Hello, All. Hopefully this will be an easy question for some of you. I have a (WordPress) site with the format of: http://www.site.com/folder-old/page-old/ I have since re-named both the parent and sub-folders to (example): http://www.site.com/folder-new/page-new/ Everything is working well EXCEPT I am also trying to redirect visitors from the old URL/structure to the new. I have a 301 redirect setup as the following: Redirect 301 /folder-old/page-old/ http://www.site.com/folder-new/page-new/ -- But it doesn't seem to be working. Not sure if this is something finicky with WordPress or if the redirect is incorrect. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Purchasing a domain to redirect to a new domain (note same industry) - Black hat or White hat technique?
Hi Everyone, Ok so here is my question. I have a client who sells gourmet tea and gourmet spices. She has a culinary blog. There is a culinary blog that just posted that the website will be shut down in the near future. It has 100% white hat links. Would it be considered black hat to buy the domain and redirect it to my clients blog which is also a culinary blog? I would really like to ask Matt Cutts this question. Does anyone know how to send him questions? Thanks Carla
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
41.000 pages indexed two years after it was redirected to a new domain
Hi!Two years ago, we changed the domain elmundodportivo.es to mundodeportivo.com. Apparently, everything was OK, but more than two years later, there are still 41.000 pages indexed in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aelmundodeportivo.es) even though all the domains have been redirected with a 301 redirect. I detected some problems with redirections that were 303 instead of 301, but we fixed that one month ago.A secondary problem is that the pagerank for elmundodportivo.es is 7 yet and mundodeportivo.com is 3.What I'm doing wrong?Thank you all,Oriol
Technical SEO | | MundoDeportivo0 -
301 redirect Issues
my clients site is www.greenbayharvest.co.uk When you enter that URL it redirects to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop, dont ask why, thats the way they set it up and thats what im stuck with. So, how do i resolve the 301 issue here. we want all things to point to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk, in terms of SEO but does the fact that there is a redirect going to /shop make this an issue? we appear to have: www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop www.greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop all these URL's go to the same same page so what is the best way to correct this? thanks for any help on this Lee
Technical SEO | | IPIM0 -
Removing 301 Redirects
Is it safe to remove old 301 Redirects from an SEO standpoint and can 301s dramatically affect seo? Prior to switching our old domain over to our new domain, we had (and currently still do) tons of 301 redirects, because of optimizing our file names and structure. Then our old domain was redirected to our new domain in the same redirect file. So that being said, now that our new domain has been up and running for about 3 months, would it be safe for me to get rid of the old 301 redirects and redirect anything that was on our old domain to our new domains home page? This would clean up our redirects tremendously and I hope would help with SEO.
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Trailing slash 301 redirect code
Hi, I have code for redirecting trailing slash to non-trailing slash, which works fine: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.yourdomain.co.uk$ [NC]RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] (got code from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html) But I cant find a code for redirecting to the trailing slash version anywhere, and I cant modify the above code myself. Can someone help resolve this issue please, or point me to a resource. Thanks very much James
Technical SEO | | jamesjackson0 -
301 Redirects Change?
Hi, Mozzers- I've noticed pages that are getting 301 redirected are staying out there longer. It used to be that you would implement a 301 redirect and then after a couple of months the old page would disappear out of Google's index. Over the last couple of months I've noticed pages lingering, popping up.... What gives? Thanks in advance! LHC
Technical SEO | | lhc670
