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
-
URL indexed but not submitted in sitemap, however the URL is in the sitemap
Dear Community, I have the following problem and would be super helpful if you guys would be able to help. Cheers Symptoms : On the search console, Google says that some of our old URLs are indexed but not submitted in sitemap However, those URLs are in the sitemap Also the sitemap as been successfully submitted. No error message Potential explanation : We have an automatic cache clearing process within the company once a day. In the sitemap, we use this as last modification date. Let's imagine url www.example.com/hello was modified last time in 2017. But because the cache is cleared daily, in the sitemap we will have last modified : yesterday, even if the content of the page did not changed since 2017. We have a Z after sitemap time, can it be that the bot does not understands the time format ? We have in the sitemap only http URL. And our HTTPS URLs are not in the sitemap What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZozoMe0 -
Safely change canonical URL many times
Hi, We are actually working on a new product information section for our network of websites (site A, B, C and D) where product landing pages allow to download information in pdf format and are active for downloads during a period of two months (active form for commercial reasons) with a unique URL (the case today). Here is a possible scenario for these product landing pages in the near future: Product is promoted in website A during 2 months (January to February) so canonical URL = A/page. Once expired, the product info. download form disappears. Customer decides to promote the same product in the same site A as well in site B from April to May so canonical URL will still be A/page. Canonical URL of B/page will point to A/page. Customer decides to relaunch his product promotion this time in site C from July to August so canonical URLs of pages A/page and B/page will now point to C/page as the latter will be the only product campaign active with a download form At the end of the year the customer does another campaign for the same product this time in website D so we will change the canonical URL of pages A/page, B/page and C/page to D/page as the latter will be the only product campaign active with a download form The obvious question here is: will this way of changing canonical URLs dynamically hurt the SEO of the section, pages, one particular website or the whole network ? Would it be better and safer to just keep the first canonical URL forever? A/page in this example Thanks so much for your input on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JulienLetellier0 -
How to redirect an url in .htaccess when "redirect 301" doesnt work
I have an odd page url, generated by a link from an external website, it has: %5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb ,after a .jpg image url, and I can't get it redirect using the redirect 301 in .htaccess to the properly image url as I use to do with the rest of not found urls eg: /15985.jpg%5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb to just: /15985.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Status0 -
Using Canonical Attribute
Hi All, I am hoping you can help me? We have recently migrated to the Umbraco CMS and now have duplicate versions of the same page showing on different URLs. My understanding is that this is one of the major reasons for the rel=canonical tag. So am I right in saying that if I add the following to the page that I want to rank then this will work? I'm just a little worried as I have read some horror stories of people implementing this attribute incorrectly and getting into trouble. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Canonical OR redirect
Hi, i've a site about sport which cover matches. for each match i've a page. last week there was a match between: T1 v T2 so a page was created: www.domain.com/match/T1vT2 - Page1 this week T2 host T1, so there's a new page www.domain.com/match/T2vT1 - Page2 each page has a unique content with Authorship, but the URL, Title, Description, H1 look very similar cause the only difference is T2 word before T1. though Page2 is available for a few days, on site links & sitemap, for the search query "T2 T1 match" Page1 appears on the SERP (high location). of course i want Page2 to be on SERP for the above query cause it's the relevant match. i even don't see Page2 anywhere on the SERP and i think it wasn't indexed. Questions: 1. do you think google see both pages as duplicated though the content is different? 2. is there a difference when you search for T1 vs T2 OR T2 vs T1 ? 3. should i redirect 301 Page1 to Page2? consider that all content for Page1 and the Authorship G+ will be lost. 4. should i make rel=canonical on Page1 to Page2? 5. should i let google sort it out? i know it's a long one, thanks for your patience. Thanks, Assaf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stassaf0 -
URL with a # but no ! being indexed
Given that it contains a #, how come Google is able to index this URL?: http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home It was my understanding that Google can't handle # properly unless it's paired with a ! (hash fragment / bang). site:http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home returns nothing, but: site:http://www.rtl.nl/xl returns http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home in the result set
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdelmanDigital0 -
Affiliate & canonicals
Hi, any help with this one would be great.... www.example.com sells widgets online. They are also promoted on a 3rd party website www.partner.com. Currently www.partner.com links to a page on www.example.com that is completely branded with the 'partners' design, style and unique copy (you would think you were still on 'partner' website). I saw this interesting article from 2011: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-seo-value-from-your-affiliate-links (in particular idea 1) Do you think adding a rel=canonical on www.example.com's partner page is still safe? All the best & thank you, Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
Why isnt my crawl results showing a 301 redirect even though I have a 301 rewrite in my .htaccess file?
Ive searched the previous Q&A's & cant find an answer so I;ll ask it here 🙂 crawling my site shows isnt the 301 redirect that i have from my non www to my www domainIts only showing all the results for my www subdomain.As i'm new to SEO & SeoMoz I dont fully understand. Any help would be greatly appreciated because my site is like 2 & a half years old & i'm trying to learn seo so I can rank higher in the serp's. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PCTechGuy20120