301s Or Stick With Canonical?
-
Hello all! A nice interesting one for you on this fine Friday...
I have some pages which are accessible by 2 different urls - This is for user experience allowing the user to get to these pages in two different ways. To keep Google happy we have a rel canonical so that Google only sees one of these urls to avoid duplicates.
After some SEO work I need to change both of these urls (on around 1,000 pages). Is the best way to do this...
To 301 every old url to every new url
Or... To not worry as I will just point the indexed pages to the new rel canonical?
Any ideas or suggestions would be brilliant.
Thanks!
-
You got it!
-
I agree with Calin. Just a canonical would not be ideal because Google is not good at removing things from the index without a redirect or an explicit request in Webmaster Tools. Canonicals don't stack up in this regard.
-
Hi Calin,
Thank you very much for your response. Just to confirm I am understanding you correctly, you are suggesting
the following approach:1. Do a 301 Redirect on both old and currently indexed URLs
- www.example.com/tennis-shoes [currently canonicalised to www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2]
- www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2
To
www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2 [The URL we want google to index]
2. www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes [canonicalise to www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2]
The second step will prevent any duplicate content issues given the content will still be accessible
from this URL as well [www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes]Finally it shouldn't be a problem to have a canonical tag on the www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2
to itself as we might need just in case the URL is accessed say using a query string (www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2?type=sports)?Once again, thank you for taking your time to reply.
-
Hi Harry,
If I'm understanding your question, both the 301 and the rel=canonical would technically be correct.
However, if I were in your position and had two old URLs, let's call them:
And, I was changing my URL structure to:
I would implement a 301 redirect for the two old pages to the new page (the one that doesn't have the rel=canonical applied). Assuming of course you don't have website restrictions that would make the update problematic. Then add the rel=canonical tag to the duplicate page as you did before.
Moz has some really great resources as well that you can check out:
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
-
This one is complicated... canonicals, href lang tags and no index
Bear with me, this is complicated (I REALLY hope one of you comes along and says, no it isn't!) Scenario A client has multiple english pages, as they have a unique product offering in AUS, US, UK, NZ and also have a global site in english. Obviously there is a lot of duplicate content and they have the relevant href lang tags set-up to help Google untangle what should be ranked where. They also have rel-canonical on each page. I've set-up search console for each of the folder structures, i.e. en-us, en-gb, en-au and so on. They have an optimised page for one of their primary keywords, which ranks nowhere for this exact keyword, but this page DOES rank for 40 similar keywords. For the exact keyword, they rank 52nd, and frustratingly, it's the homepage that ranks. We know the correct page is ranking and is indexed because search console tells us so and we see the exact page appear in SERPs for the other 40 keywords. When I look at the en-us site in Search Console, it tells me that the home page is not being indexed, because a rel canonical tag is prioritising an alternative page (probably the global site) - however, the en-us homepage is showing up in rankings for a lot of their important keywords. The site has been live for 6 months and the optimised page for about 3 months. Questions 1. If search console is saying the homepage is not ranking, how is it showing up in SERPs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Algorhythm_jT
2. Why is the homepage ranking for this important keyword, when there is virtually no mention of the keyword versus the page that is almost perfect according to Moz's on-page grader?
3. Do you need href lang tags AND rel canonical on a page?
4. How long before a new page that is optimised for a keyword take to replace (and hopefully surpass) the homepage?
5. If the US is the most important market, should we guide Google to that fact using rel-canonical? Really appreciate your feedback, hivemind. Thanks0 -
301s being indexed
A client website was moved about six months ago to a new domain. At the time of the move, 301 redirects were setup from the pages on the old domain to point to the same page on the new domain. New pages were setup on the old domain for a different purpose. Now almost six months later when I do a query in google on the old domain like site:example.com 80% of the pages returned are 301 redirects to the new domain. I would have expected this to go away by now. I tried removing these URLs in webmaster tools but the removal requests expire and the URLs come back. Is this something we should be concerned with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
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 -
HTTPS in Rel Canonical
Hi, Should I, or do I need to, use HTTPS (note the "S") in my canonical tags? Thanks Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Another E-commerce Canonical Question
Hi guys, Quick question: one of our clients has an e-commerce site with a very poor canonical tag setup and thousands of pages of duplicate content. Let's use this as an example: BRAND > Category > Type > Color
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elcrazyhorse
Four separate pages/URLs. The BRAND page lists all products.
The Category page lists all BRAND products for that category.
The Type page lists all BRAND products of a specific type in that category.
The Color page lists all BRAND products of a specific type in that category of a specific color. Anyway, these generate four separate URLs: /BRAND
/BRAND/Category
/BRAND/Category-Type
/BRAND/Category-Type-Color Avoiding duplicate content and product listings, I would appreciate your proposed canonicalization strategy/feedback.0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0 -
Rel Canonical = WHAT
can someone please explain this "NOTICE" i am getting from my campaign...Is this a problem that needs attention?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0 -
Rel canonical element for different URL's
Hello, We have a new client that has several sites with the exact same content. They do this for tracking purposes. We are facing political objections to combine and track differently. Basically, we have no choice but to deal with the situation given. We want to avoid duplicate content issues, and want to SEO only one of the sites. The other sites don't really matter for SEO (they have off-line campaigns pointing to them) we just want one of the sites to get all the credit for the content. My questions: 1. Can we use the rel canonical element on the irrelevent pages/URL's to point to the site we care about? I think I remember Matt Cutts saying this can't be done across URL's. Am I right or wrong? 2. If we can't, what options do I have (without making the client change their entire tracking strategy) to make the site we are SEO'ing the relevant content? Thanks a million! Todd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GravitateOnline0