Considering redirecting or canonicalization - Best Practice
-
Hi,
I'm having a techinical problem and I would like advise on the effects this is having on my SEO efforts.
My old site www.oldsiteexample.com (live for about 8 years)
Directs to my new site www.example.com which is fine BUT
When I type me new website into the tool bar both sides are found & do not direct to one domain;
www.example.com & example.com (both the same site)
What is the best practice here? Direct my new non www to my new www site considering my old website directs to the www.
Advise & the SEO affects this is having my website would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
-
MJ, the challenge with that suggestion is it sounds like you are maintaining two websites. That solution would not work for any situation with UGC or any data which changes over time.
Even in cases where the pages were purely static content, a canonical tag would notify search engines of the page you wish to be indexed but not users.
-
A 301 will pass over the link equity also!
-
Also, Ryan is of course correct to say you can use the www. or non www. version - I just have a preference for www. because I think it looks neater!
-
I agree that a 301 is most certainly the best long term solution; however the canonical also provides an opportunity to send over some of the value to the new page/domain before you do that. Hence I usually implement the canonical for a month or two, then redirect. Especially when you're moving to a new domain, it's a good way to faze in the move over rather than going cold turkey, as it were.
If the site has over 600 pages, I'd pick the 50-100 most common landing pages (see Google Analytics) and transfer them. If 10 of the pages get 10000 visits each and the other 590 get 2 visits each, maybe just do the top ten. Hope that makes sense!
-
You can use the www or non-www version of your site. The important thing is to choose one version and remain consistent. It sounds like you prefer the "www" version which is a perfectly fine choice.
When given a choice between canonical or 301, the best practice is 301. Both work, but a 301 is preferred.
Two additional best practices:
1. I know it can be a lot of work but you really should redirect each page of the old site to the corresponding page on the new site. If you simply changed domains the 301 can be written with a single regex statement to replace "oldsiteexample.com" with "example.com"
2. Check your existing 301s on the old site and adjust them to directly point to the new site. You want to avoid any instances where a user has to hop through multiple 301s to arrive at a target page.
-
cheers for the advise. a) I'm looking to transfer the value from my old domain to my new one.
The site has over 600 pages, It wouldn't really be ideal for me to put canonical tags on each of the old pages to the relevant new pages. (can this be done automatically?)
B) Yes I was looking for advise on the new site and which domain should be the main ie: the www (I'll go with the www considering my old site directs to the www)
-
P.S. for got b) !! If it's b), I always redirect to the www. page. You can set that in webmaster tools and also do server side redirects.
-
Not 100% sure what you're asking - do you want to a) transfer value from an old domain to a new domain? Or b) do you want to know whether you should redirect non-www. URLs to the www. equivalent?
If it's a), I'd keep the old site live for a couple of months and set up canonical tags on each page and point them towards the most relevant page on the new site. Leave that to sink in for a couple of months, then I'd 301 pages on the old site to the new site (to the same pages you'd pointed them at with the canonical tag). Leave the 301s in place for at least 180 days, after that you can kill the old site altogether.
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
-
Best practices for lazy loading (content)
Hi all, We are working on a new website and we want to know the best practices for lazy loading of google for content.
Technical SEO | | JohnPalmer
My best sample is: bloomberg.com , look at their homepage. Thank y'all!0 -
Where and how much; Schema best practices.
Couple of schema questions: Should I 'only' mark up the contact page, as this has the most information? What about the header and footer, should I tag everything there also? If I do mark up the header, footer, and contact page, I end up with 3 "LocalBusiness" entries in Google testing tool, is that bad?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
600+ 404 Errors: Best Practice for Redirects?
Hi All, I've just checked my GWMT profile for one of my client's sites and found that there are currently over 600 404 Error notifications! This is not that surprising given that we very recently redesigned and launched their new corporate site, which previously had a ton of "junk" legacy pages. I was wondering if it would work in terms of efficient SEO to simply apply a 301 redirect from the 404 page to our root to solve this issue? If not what would be a good solution? Thanks in advance for all your great advice!
Technical SEO | | G2W1 -
Best way to deal with these urls?
Found overly dynamic urls in the crawl report. http://www.trespass.co.uk/camping/festivals-friendly/clothing?Product_sort=PriceDesc&utm_campaign=banner&utm_medium=blog&utm_source=Roslyn Best way to deal with these? Cheers Guys
Technical SEO | | Trespass0 -
Best Google Practice for Hacked SIte: Shift Servers/IP or Disavow?
Hi - Over the past few months, I've identified multiple sites which are linking into my site and creating fake pages (below is an example and there's over 500K+ of similar links from various sites}. I've attempted to contact the hosting companies, etc. with little success. Was wondering if my best course of action might be at this point: A) which servers (or IP address). B) Use the Google Disavow tool? C) both. example: { http://aryafar.com/crossings/200-krsn-team-part19.html } Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | hhdentist0 -
Redirects 301
Hello, I need to reedirect a URL of a page that I have in my site (http://digitaldiscovery.com.pt/servicos-de-marketing-digital/publicidade-online/) to a new URL with SEO porpuses. Whats the best way to this? I use Wordpress btw. Tks in advance! PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
Redirect Multiple Domains
This is a follow-up question from one posted earlier this month. I can't linked to that because it's a private question so I'm trying to summarize it below. We have a number of domains – about 20 - (e.g. www.propertysharp.com) that point to our main domain ip adress (www.propertyshark.com) and share the same content. This is no black-hat strategy whatsoever, the domains were acquired several years ago in order to help people who mistyped the websites url to reach their desired destination. The question was whether to redirect them to our main domain or not. Pros were the reportedly millions of incoming links from these domains - cons was the fact that lots of issues regarding duplicate content could arise and we actually saw lots of some pages from these domains ranking in the search engines. We were recommended to redirect them, but to take it gradually. I have a simple question - what does gradually mean - one domain per week, per month?
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0