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
-
/essions/essions keeps appending to 1 url on our website
Moz keeps giving us an error showing URL too long, when I investigate the offending url, I get this in the crawl. We can't work out what /essions is or why it's appending to the end of the url. Is this a Moz or website issue? <colgroup><col width="841"></colgroup>
Moz Pro | | NickWillWright
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |
| https://www.mywebsite/singita-lebombo-lodge/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/essions/ |0 -
Pages with URL Too Long
Hello Mozzers! MOZ keeps kindly telling me the URLs are too long. However, this is largely due to the structure of E-commerce site, which has to include 'brand' 'range' and 'products' keyword. For example -
Moz Pro | | tigersohelll
https://www.choicefurnituresuperstore.co.uk/Devonshire-Rustic-Oak-Bedside-Cabinet-1-Drawer-p40668.html MOZ recommends no more than 75 characters. This means we have 25-30 characters for both the brand name and product name. Questions:
If it is an issue, how to fix it on my site?
If it's not an issue, how can we turn off this alert from MOZ?
Anyone know how big an issue URLs are as a ranking factor? I thought pretty low.0 -
Can someone kindly explain what 'Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags' means? Is this a critical error and how can it be rectified?
Can someone kindly explain what 'Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags' means? Is this a critical error and how can it be rectified?
Moz Pro | | JoshMcLean0 -
Crawlers reporting upper case letter url versions although these have been 301'd to lower case !?
Hi I have a client e-com site who's dev platform is on a windows server Their product pages have been auto-named after the product title, with the first letter in each word being upper case, which has hence translated to the URL having upper cases instances too. I asked them to set up 301 redirects for all url's that had upper case instances to lower case versions, which they say they have done. However I'm still seeing url's with upper case instances showing up in webmaster tools and moz crawl reports but when I copy & paste them into a browser they do redirect to, & resolve in, the lower case version. Its also upper case versions reported in the Google cache! So how come webmaster tools & Moz etc are reporting the upper case versions, surely if redirected it should be the lower case versions All Best Dan
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Why do I see a duplicate content errors when rel="canonical" tag is present
I was reviewing my first Moz crawler report and noticed the crawler returned a bunch of duplicate page content errors. The recommendations to correct this issue are to either put a 301 redirect on the duplicate URL or use the rel="canonical" tag so Google knows which URL I view as the most important and the one that should appear in the search results. However, after poking around the source code I noticed all of the pages that are returning duplicate content in the eyes of the Moz crawler already have the rel="canonical" tag. Does the Moz crawler simply not catch whether that tag is being used? If I have that tag in place, is there anything else I need to do in order to get that error to stop showing up in the Moz crawler report?
Moz Pro | | shinolamoz0 -
Duplicate content & canonicals
Hi, Working on a website for a company that works in different european countries. The setup is like this: www.website.eu/nl
Moz Pro | | nvs.nim
www.website.eu/be
www.website.eu/fr
... You see that every country has it's own subdir, but NL & BE share the same language, dutch... The copywriter wrote some unique content for NL and for BE, but it isn't possible to write unique for every product detail page because it's pretty technical stuff that goes into those pages. Now we want to add canonical tags to those identical product pages. Do we point the canonical on the /be products to /nl products or visa versa? Other question regarding SEOmoz: If we add canonical tags to x-pages, do they still appear in the Crawl Errors "duplicate page content", or do we have to do our own math and just do "duplicate page content" minus "Rel canonical" ?0 -
I don't get what a dynamic URL is?
I have a whole bunch of them and I have no idea how I created them. I just make titles, that's it. Nothin' fancy.
Moz Pro | | annasus0 -
Can someone explain why I have been seeing an increase in the number of Linking Page URLs in OSE that link directly to downloads?
Ever since the last couple Linkscape updates when doing competitive back link analysis I have noticed a large increase in the number of URLs of Linking Pages in OSE that result in an immediate file download. The majority of the time these downloads are not common files ie PDF, DOC files. For example, these were all in a competitors back link profile: http://download.unesp.br/linux/debian/pool/main/i/isc-dhcp/isc-dhcp-relay-dbg_4.1.1-P1-17_ia64.deb http://snow.fmi.fi/data/20090210_eurasia_sd_025grid.mat http://www.rose-hulman.edu/class/me/HTML/ES204_0708_S/working model examples/Le25 mad hatter.wm?a=p&id=145880&g=5&p=sia&date=iso&o=ajgrep These are just a few I came across for a single competitor. Is this sketchy black hat SEO, some sort of error, actual links, or something else? Any information on this subject would be helpful. Thank you.
Moz Pro | | Gyi0