Cross Canonicals or Meta Refresher Redirect
-
Hi,
I'm moving a website from a blogspot address to a wordpress blog with a custom domain. Since I don't have access to the servers at Blogspot (Blogger), I can't do a 301 redirect and have to do a meta refresher redirect. The bad thing about this is because it's a meta refresher some people going to the blog (especially at work) are getting a spam alert warning. I want to keep as much page equity as possible. Also I don't know how I can do a change of address in GWT since I can't do a 301 redirect. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Matt
-
Hey Matt,
I'm not sure without researching if Blogspot has this, but one thing you might want to consider is a cross-domain canonical tag. Dr Pete has done a few great posts on the different was to use rel="canonical" that might apply in your situation. See http://moz.com/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks and http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Hope that gets you started!
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
-
Mobile Redirect - Cloaking/Sneaky?
Question since Google is somewhat vague on what they consider mobile "equivalent" content. This is the hand we're dealt with due to budget, no m.dot, etc, responsive/dynamic is on the roadmap but still a couple quarters away but, for now, here's the situation. We have two sets of content and experiences, one for desktop and one for mobile. The problem is that desktop content does not = mobile content. The layout, user experience, images and copy aren't the same across both versions - they are not dramatically different but not identical. In many cases, no mobile equivalent exists. Dev wants to redirect visitors who find the desktop version in mobile search to the equivalent mobile experience, when it exists, when it doesn't they want to redirect to the mobile homepage - which really isn't a homepage it's an unfiltered view of the content. Yeah we have push state in place for the mobile version etc. My concern is that Google will look at this as cloaking, maybe not in the cases where there's a near equivalent piece of content, but definitely when we're redirecting to the "homepage". Not to mention this isn't a great user experience and will impact conversion/engagement metrics which are likely factors Google's algorithm considers. What's the MOZ Community say about this? Cloaking or Not and Why? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jose_R0 -
Hreflang/Canonical Inquiry for Website with 29 different languages
Hello, So I have a website (www.example.com) that has 29 subdomains (es.example.com, vi.example.com, it.example.com, etc). Each subdomain has the exact same content for each page, completely translated in its respective language. I currently do not have any hreflang/canonical tags set up. I was recently told that this (below) is the correct way to set these tags up -For each subdomain (es.example.com/blah-blah for this example), I need to place the hreflang tag pointing to the page the subdomain is on (es.example.com/blah-blah), in addition to every other 28 subdomains that have that page (it.example.com/blah-blah, etc). In addition, I need to place a canonical tag pointing to the main www. version of the website. So I would have 29 hreflang tags, plus a canonical tag. When I brought this to a friends attention, he said that placing the canonical tag to the main www. version would cause the subdomains to drop out of the SERPs in their respective country search engines, which I obviously wouldn't want to do. I've tried to read articles about this, but I end up always hitting a wall and further confusing myself. Can anyone help? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Two sites, heavily cross linking, targeting the same keyword - is this a battle worth fighting?
Hi Mozzers, Would appreciate your input on this, as many people have differing views on this when asked... We manage 2 websites for the same company (very different domains) - both sites are targeting the same primary keyword phrase, however, the user journey should incorporate both websites, and therefore the sites are very heavily cross linked - so we can easily pass a user from one site to another. Whilst site 1 is performing well for the target keyword phrase, site 2 isn't. Site 1 is always around 2 to 3 rank, however we've only seen site 2 reach the top of page 2 in SERPs at best, despite a great deal of white hat optimisation, and is now on the decline. There's also a trend (all be it minimal) of when site 1 improves in rank, site 2 drops. Because the 2 sites are so heavily inter-linked could Google be treating them as one site, and therefore dropping site 2 in the SERPs, as it is in Google's interests to show different, relevant sites?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | A_Q0 -
Meta Description Lengths?
Hi All, I've heard so many different opinions on meta description lengths. What's your general consensus? Some say up to 250 characters, Moz says around 150-160 characters, and Google typically truncates to no more than, say 160 characters. One might say then that clearly you shouldn't go above what Google shows, but my experience shows that it's not a deal breaker at all for ranking. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
Redirecting location-specific domains
I am working on a project for a physician who only cares about reaching patients within a specific geographic region. He has a new technique at his practice and wants to get the word out via radio spots. I want to track the effectiveness of the radio campaigns without the use of call-tracking numbers or special promo codes. Since the physician's primary domain is very long (but well-established), my thought is to register 3-4 short domains referencing the technique and location so they would be easy for listeners to remember and type-in later. 301 these domains to the relevant landing page on the main domain. As an alternative. Each domain could be a single relevant landing page with a link to the relevant procedure on the main site. It's not as if there is anything deceptive going on, rather, I would simply be using a domain in place of a call tracking number. I think I should be able to view the type-in traffic in Analytics, but would Google have an issue with this? Thoughts and suggestions appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SCW0 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0