302 to a page and rel=canonical back to the original (to preserve url juice)?
-
Bit of a weird case, but let me explain.
We use unbounce.com to create our landing pages, which are on a separate sub-domain (get.domain.com).
Some of these landing pages have a substantial amount of useful information and are part of our content building strategy (our content marketers are able to deploy them without going through the dev team cycle).We'd like to make sure the seo page-juice is counting towards our primary domain and not the subdomain.
(It would also help if we one day stop using unbounce and just migrate our landing page content to our primary website).Would it be an SEO faux-pas to do the following:
domain.com/awesome-page ---[302]---> get.domain.com/awesome-page
get.domain.com/awesome-page ---[rel=canonical]---> domain.com/awesome-pageMy understanding is that our primary domain would hold all the "page juice" whilst sending users to the unbounce landing page - and the day we stop using unbounce, we just kill the redirect and host the content on our primary domain.
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for confirming our thoughts - we'll focus on building content for now, benefit where we can with our landing pages on sub-domains, and optimise further once we pull away from hosted solutions for content pages.
-
It is a "faux pas". The problem with the solution you propose is that the canonical url you are pointing to doesn't exist (domain.com/awesome-page has status 302 = temporarily moved to another location). Check http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html - best practices
- A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version.
- Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists
With the canonical you indicate that you prefer that domain.com/awesome-page is shown in the search results rather than get.domain.com/awesome-page - Google will however not put pages with 302 status in the search results
Not sure if it's possible - but the best solution would be to maintain both pages & put a canonical on unbounce.If that is not possible - just leave it as it is. The moment you stop working with unbounce you 301 these pages to the corresponding pages on the main domain.
Dirk
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
-
Can I remove certain parameters from the canonical URL?
For example, https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives?page=2&resultsPerPage=16 is the paginated URL of the category https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives/. Can I remove the &resultsPerPage= variation from the canonical without it causing an issue? Even though the actual page URL has that parameter? I was thinking of using this: instead of: What is the best practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | laurengdicenso0 -
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
Canonicals Passing Link Juice?
After having read this thread, the answer seems to be a tentative "Yes", but I am curious if I am doing this wrong, or causing myself problems, for a specific situation. We have a thread on the forums that has over 50,000 views for that thread alone. No doubt many people have linked to it across the web, and it ranks very well with Google. But we are dealing with a major problem in that the main portion of our site (home page and core content) which are the most important, aren't ranking in Google at all. A big part of this is because that part of the site hasn't been updated in years, whereas the forum is updated daily. By users. We've begun putting out quality content in our News Center lately, and hoping to start boosting its presence in Google. We have an article on the exact same topic that the forum thread covers. I was thinking of putting a canonical on that thread, pointing to the article, and hopefully pointing some very powerful link juice, popularity, and traffic into our news center articles. People can comment there as well if they like. Are there any potential downsides to doing this? My hope is that the forum thread loses rankings and the article takes on its rankings. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HLTalk1 -
Sitemap generator which only includes canonical urls
Does anyone know of a 3rd party sitemap generator that will only include the canonical url's? Creating a sitemap with geo and sorting based parameters isn't the most ideal way to generate sitemaps. Please let me know if anyone has any ideas. Mind you we have hundreds of thousands of indexed url's and this can't be done with a simple text editor.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
Intra-linking to pages with a different Canonical url ?
Hello Moz Community! I'm hoping to get some advice around intra-linking practices and the benefits when a page that is being linked to has a different canonical tag than it's own URL. Confused? Allow me to elaborate. Scenario: Background: Ecommerce Company is trying to increase its organic ranking for key, broad terms in the cycling industry. Ecommerce company is trying to rank its category pages for a main term. To help this, the company focusing on increasing the quality of its intra-linking structure (the links and anchor texts that link to another page within the site). Example goal: to have it's Road Cassettes category page rank for 'Road Cassettes' Company's 'cassettes' main category page is here: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/ And the company uses filtered navigation logic to drill down into 'road cassettes' specifically: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True SEOs are instructed to include occasional links back to this page, with SEO friendly anchor text, to help strengthen it's authority for the main term. The Issue / Question: Main category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/ Road Cassettes category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True Road Cassettes Canonical URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/ The canonical URL of the filtered Road Cassettes category is its main category URL. Will Company be able to effectively rank its Road Cassettes category URL for 'Road Cassettes' if the canonical URL is the main category? Should the canonical URL not be the main category? OR Will increasing the intra-linking to the Road Cassettes URL help the main category URL rank for 'Road Cassettes' - by passing all it's authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ray-pp0 -
Google is displaying my pages path instead of URLS (Pages name)
Does anyone knows why Google is displaying my pages path instead of the URL in the search results, i discoverd that while am searching using a keyword of mine then i copied the link http://www.smarttouch.me/services-saudi/web-services/web-design and found all related results are the same, could anyone one tell me why is that and is it really differs? or the URL display is more important than the Path display for SEO!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ali8810 -
Is link juice passed through a 301 and a canonical tag?
Hi all, I am led to believe that link juice does not pass through more than one 301 redirect, however what about a 301 and then a canonical meta tag? Here is an example: subdomain.site.com/uk/page/ -> 301 -> **www.**site.com/uk/page/ www.site.com**/uk/**page/ -> canonical -> www.site.com/page/ Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Further
Chris0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0