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.
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
-
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page?
Thanks so much!
-Amy
-
You're right. As I was writing my response I realized this is not a good way to go about it. There's really no reason to keep these duplicate content pages. We are pulling content from our database of clients and some of them had been entered more than once in our system, so they created duplicate pages of content and we were thinking we would want the latest version of the client's content which would also contain the active order in our system to be the "main page" but we really just need to remove the older ones instead.
Thanks so much for your help, and I am sorry for the confusion!
-
How similar is the content?
I'm pretty sure you're not going to pass any link juice or authority to the new page using a canonical tag, especially if it has different content; it's just not a great way to fix anything.
Useful if the URL changes depending on how you end up at a destination page, but if you just happen to have 2 different pages about 'widgets' then sharing a canonical tag between them won't do too much.
Can you give me an example of what it is you're actually doing and why you think the pages should be the same? (I'm just not getting the impression they are the same page, sorry if I'm wrong)
-
Thank you for your response, Barry!
So, if we do just change the "official" page and make that page the canonical URL it won't hurt the rankings or anything that the original canonical URL had?
-
Thanks for your response Ian!
We aren't looking to completely replace the page, we just want to change the canonical page to the latest one added and I am looking to find out if that does any sort of damage to whatever linkjuice or ranking the original canonical page has or if it will just transfer. Sorry if it is confusing.
-
If you've made an entirely new page with the same content and it's in the one location and you can change all your links to look there, then 301 the old page to the new page, don't just use rel=canonical.
If you've added a new category, so the old page was, for example, site/colour/product and you now allowed navigation like site/shape/product, then you may want to change the canonical tag if the 'shape' route into the page is the new "official" page.
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
-
Duplicate content in sidebar
Hi guys. So I have a few sentences (about 50 words) of duplicate content across all pages of my website (this is a repeatable text in sidebar). Each page of my website contains about 1300 words (unique content) in total, and 50 words of duplicate content in sidebar. Does having a duplicate content of this length in sidebar affect the rankings of my website in any way? Thank you so much for your replies.
On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov1 -
Does using Yoast variables for meta content overwrite any pages that already have custom meta content?
The question is about the Yoast plugin for WP sites. Let's say I have a site with 200 pages and custom meta descriptions / title tags already in place for the top 30 pages. If I use the Yoast variable tool to complete meta content for the remaining pages (and make my Moz issue tracker look happier), will that only affect the pages without custom meta descriptions or will it overwrite even the pages with the custom meta content that I want? In this situation, I do want to keep the meta content that is already in place on select pages. Thanks! Zack
On-Page Optimization | | rootandbranch0 -
How to 301 redirect, without access to .htaccess and to a new domain
There are few ways to do this and I would like to ask other Mozzers if they have found the best way. We have a site .co.uk and are moving it back to .com. However we do not have any access to the site folders for .co.uk. (We have to move it anyway as our provider is withdrawing their service). We have built our URL 301 redirect file and it is ready to go, but how to impliment it? We can repoint .co.uk to another site, and then redirect all traffic for each URL but this is quite messy, or just forget trying to 301 each page and just rediect the whole site.
On-Page Optimization | | BruceA
the .com has more authority already, but we ready do not want to frustrate visitors who are using a link to reach a product, only to find they hit our homepage and not the product. Your thoughts would be very welcome or other ideas Bruce0 -
301 Redirect to external site
Hi guys, We have a client who is getting their website redesigned through us. They are discontinuing couple of their services which will not get featured in the new site. They are fairly well ranked for these services and my client wishes to 301 redirect these pages to an external site owned by his friend so that they benefit out of the ranking. The question is: Will my client's website's general ranking get affected due to 301 redirecting to an external site? The external site is not spammy or red-flagged by Google (at the moment, at least). Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RameshNair
Ramesh Nair0 -
Duplicate content penalty
when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content. I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site. My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects. I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes0 -
Duplicate Content - Blog Rewriting
I have a client who has requested a rewrite of 250 blog articles for his IT company. The blogs are dispersed on a variety of platforms: his own website's blog, a business innovation website, and an IT website. He wants to have each article optimised with keyword phrases and then posted onto his new website thrice weekly. All of this is in an effort to attract some potential customers to his new site and also to establish his company as a leader in its field. To what extent would I need to rewrite each article so as to avoid duplicating the content? Would there even be an issue if I did not rewrite the articles and merely optimised them with keywords? Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0 -
Percentage of duplicate content allowable
Can you have ANY duplicate content on a page or will the page get penalized by Google? For example if you used a paragraph of Wikipedia content for a definition/description of a medical term, but wrapped it in unique content is that OK or will that land you in the Google / Panda doghouse? If some level of duplicate content is allowable, is there a general rule of thumb ratio unique-to-duplicate content? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | sportstvjobs0