Rel Canonical issues for two urls sharing same IP address
-
Our client built a wordpress site on url A, then opted for a better url B. Rather than moving all the wordpress files/website over to the new url B, they just contacted GoDaddy, who hosted BOTH urls under the same IP address.
When I do a term target on url B, I'm flagged for rel canonical use. I can only get a B grade for each keyword. (I've also tried using url A, but I get the same flag and B grade results).
I'm not sure if this set-up will thwart our seo efforts for the site, because only the homepage comes up when you type in url B anyway. Every subsequent page displays the original url A. Somewhere, wordpress is also adding a rel canonical link on the homepage source to url A, too, which we can't seem to edit.
So, question is: is it ok to leave this set up as is with both urls hosted on the same IP address, or should we move the whole site over to the desired url B?
Thanks much!
-
Thanks for your answer, John. So, we should have the client 301 the url A to the desired url B. Confirmed!
-
This doesn't sound ideal. So only the home page is under URL B, and the rest of the pages are hosted under URL A? That would seem really strange to me as a user if I entered through URL B, went to another page, and the domain changed completely.
Ideally, you should 301 redirect everything under URL A to URL B rather than using rel=canonical for them. There's no reason to host two identical sites like this. It's fine for multiple sites to be hosted under the same IP. Here's a really good SEOMoz blog post about using 301 redirects vs.canonical tags.
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
-
A tale of two pages - one ranks great and one doesn't - but they are set up the same way
Hi everyone, First time poster 🙂 I will keep it simple - we have two pages on our website that are set up in the same way (or so we think) but achieve vastly different search engine rankings. We have spent weeks trying to figure out why this should be the case, but to no avail. Perhaps you guys can do a little diagnosis and see what we are missing: for search term: used machine tools www.machinetoolsonline.co.za/buy-used-machine-tools Is working well for us. for search term: new machine tools www.machinetoolsonline.co.za/buy-new-machine-tools is a disaster 😞 In fact, Google ranks our home page which is optimised for other terms, higher. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Delorentis210 -
"redirects" with no "redirect address"?
Episode 2 of "Damon the idiot noob" web series . . . I have like . . ..90 plus temporary redirects in my moz "medium priority diagnostics". But the majority of them have a url, but no redicret url. How can it be a temporary redirect if there is no redirect address? Some of the addresses simply don't make any sense. Like: http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/catalog/seo_sitemap/product How on earth would a "seo_sitemap" be followed my a "/product"? This is a Magento site, so I know some of these things get created automatically . .. but what on earth is going on here? Help welcome, appreciated, and welcome. Did I mention it is welcome and appreciated?
Moz Pro | | damon12120 -
Issues with Moz producing 404 Errors from sitemap.xml files recently.
My last campaign crawl produced over 4k 404 errors resulting from Moz not being able to read some of the URLs in our sitemap.xml file. This is the first time we've seen this error and we've been running campaigns for almost 2 months now -- no changes were made to the sitemap.xml file. The file isn't UTF-8 encoded, but rather Content-Type:text/xml; charset=iso-8859-1 (which is what Moveable Type uses). Just wondering if anyone has had a similar issue?
Moz Pro | | BriceSMG0 -
Site explorer Issue
Hello, I'm looking to see in the Site Explorer the links coming from directories such as BOW, yahoo etc. I'm listed there from almost 1 year and these links are not listed, the same with my competitors. I'm missing something? Thank you Claudio
Moz Pro | | SharewarePros0 -
SEOMoz Q&A having some issues?
Apologies if this has been asked. I was browsing Q&A and got a Ruby error page, reloaded and everything was fine. However a bunch of the topics are kind of messed up, and it looks like a chunk of them are missing now. For example my 'questions I've answered' section of My Q&A only has the newest question and the oldest question, and when I sort the SEOMoz Tools category by newest I get one recent post and then the next one is from November of last year. You guys having database problems?
Moz Pro | | icecarats0 -
Issue with temporary redirects
I have an issue with my temporary redirects. The seomoz campaign is showing many pages are redirecting to the homepage. However, the pages it identifies are old pages and have been deleted and are not on the sitemap. How do i solve this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0 -
"Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" issue
Hi I am having an issue with my site showing duplicate page title and content issues for www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ Is the trailing slash really an issue? Can someone help me with a mod_rewrite rule to sort this please? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | JoeBrewer
Joe0 -
Have I got Rel Canonical or not?
I have 180 warnings of rel=canonical. The exact wording says this: Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical. First - I don't know what that means - is that a good thing of bad thing? Second - Because of the above question, Im not sure if I have it or should have or it do have it but shouldn't. Which should I have? What should it look like? How do I fix it? Also, I have notices that say 'issue: 301 redirect' and a line about what a 301 redirect is. Again, do I have it, or not have it, should I have it? Do I have it but shouldn't?
Moz Pro | | borderbound0