Is it bad I have a cluster of canonical urls that 301 re-direct?
-
Just went through a migration. We have a group of canonical URLs that are NOT the preferred url, but 301 re-direct to the preferred URL. Does this essentially "break even" and the incorrect canonical URL becomes obsolete? And/or would this be considered potentially bad and confusing for bots?
-
Hi Dmitrii,
Thank you! I totally agree. After writing this question out, I knew it would be just as confusing for bots. The request for change has been submitted to my team.
-
Messing with canonical is dangerous! This daisy chain in rel=canonical can quick eat your crawling budget and/or deindex important pages. You can see Glenn Gabe articles about them:
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/dangerous-rel-canonical-problems/
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/redirects-duplicate-content-seo/In reality such incorrect canonicals confuses bot too much.
-
Hi there.
Well, it surely confused me
Yes, it's confusing to bots and seems kinda shady to me. If it's possible, do it straight forward - canonicalize to prefrred url.
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
-
Index an URL without directly linking it?
Hi everyone, Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants. Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and: Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D). So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not? In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
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 -
Use Canonical or Robots.txt for Map View URL without Backlink Potential
I have a Page X with lots of unique content. This page has a "Map view" option, which displays some of the info from Page X, but a lot is ommitted. Questions: Should I add canonical even though Map View URL does not display a lot of info from Page X or adding to robots.txt or noindex, follow? I don't see any back links coming to Map View URL Should Map View page have unique H1, title tag, meta des?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
301 entire site
Is there a good 301 code snippet to change just the root domain but keep the ending extensions? I just bid on a domain that I think would be much better for me moving forward, but do not want to have to try going through thousands of pages to do their 301 individually My site is almost 4 yrs old. Well established and has a large fanbase. Several of our social networks are under the name of the new branded domain, hence part of the desire to switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
301 canonical'd pages?
I have an ecommerce site with many different URLs with the same product. Let's say the product is a hat. It's in: a a) mysite.com/products/hat b) mysite.com/collections/head-ware/hat c) mysite.com/collections/stuff-to-wear-on-your-head/hat Right now, A is the canonical page for B and C. I want to clean up my site, so that every product only has ONE unique URL, which is linked to from all the collections. So B and C URL will be broken. Is it necessary that I 301 them if they were already canonical'd? Based on the number of products I have, I would have to 301 1000+ URLs. I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do to avoid getting penalized. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
Two homepage urls
We have two different homepages for our website. One is designed for daytime users (i.e. businesses), whereas the second night version is designed with home consumers in mind. Is this hurting our SEO by having two homepage urls, instead of just building a strong presence around one? We have set up canonical meta on each one: On the night version: domain.com/indexnight.html we have a On the day version: domain.com/index.html we have a It seems to me that we should just choose one of them and set up a permanent 301 redirect from one to the other. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
How canonical url harm our website???
Even though my website has no similar/copied content, i used rel=canonical for all my website pages. Is Google or yahoo make any harm to my SERP's?? EX: http://www.seomoz.org is my site, in that i used canonical as rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.seomoz.org" to my home page like that similar to all pages, i created rel=canonical. Is search engine harm my website???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MadhukarSV0 -
Targeting Keywords at Home page or 301 URL?
Background info This is a new site and I am using Wordpress for a CMS not a blog and I have set a static page as the home page. The problem is when I configure the home page as a static page in wordpress it sets a 301 redirect to that page, which is this domain.com/software-consultancy (so the software-consultancy page is now domain.com). I thought about creating a separate Home page but I didn't see the point as the pages would be almost identical. **"Should I target keywords to the home page?" ** If I start link building using the phrase "software consultancy" to the home page should I link to domain.com or the 301 redirect URL domain.com/software-consultancy ? My thoughts are that if the URL has the keywords I am targeting in it will help with SEO. Or should I create a separate home page and just link the company name back to the home and have a separate page for "software consultancy" my thought is that having exactly what the company does on the home page would be better. But I don't want to lose out on search engine traffic by not having the keywords in the URL I am going to be link building for. I guess if I link build to the 301 redirect URL I can always revert back to this URL if I want to change? FYI here is my site structure: The site is for a small software consultancy and I have the following structure: domain.com/software-consultancy -- (Set as Wordpress static Page so essentially a 301 redirect to / ) domain.com/software-consultancy/areas domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/london domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/new-york I would really appreciate some feedback on this, even if it's experience / advice and there is no exact answer. Many Thanks, J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0