cross canonicalization with redirect
-
I'm working with a website that has turned one of its pages into its own website within the main website - mostly for the ease of customers, making it simpler to access that page using www.page.com rather than www.mainsite.com/about/page.
As a result, there are two urls for that page (the ones just mentioned), both pointing to the exact same page, but with different urls. Now, they have made it so www.mainsite.com/about/page permanently redirects to www.page.com. which I thought was a good call. However, what do I do about canonicalization? Is it good to point the canonicalization of www.page.com to www.mainsite.com/about/page so that the rankings and link equity are maintained in the main website? Or would the fact that the www.mainsite.com/about/page redirects to www.page.com mess that up?I hope this makes sense!
-
thanks you for information. jacketskingdom.com
-
@JefferyDavis Thank you so much! Yes, I figured most of that as I was mulling it over. But I had not thought of checking to monitor indexing, etc.
Thank you for the reminder! -
@Shrine-SEO-Gal In this situation, it's important to handle canonicalization carefully to ensure that search engines understand which URL you want to be recognized as the primary source of content, and to maintain your site's SEO value.
Here are some steps you can take:
Use the Correct Canonical Tag: On the new page, set the canonical tag to point to itself. This signals to search engines that this is the preferred version of the page.
Redirect the Old URL: Implement a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one. This indicates to search engines that the page has permanently moved.
Avoid Canonical Conflicts: Do not point the canonical tag on the new page back to the old one. This could create confusion and dilute link equity.
Monitor Performance: After implementing these changes, monitor your website’s performance in search engines using tools to track indexing and any potential issues.
Update Internal Links: Ensure that all internal links on the main site are updated to point to the new page to reinforce the new URL structure.
By following these steps, you can effectively manage the transition and help maintain your site's SEO value.
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
-
Cross Domain Canonicalization for Site Folder
Hello colleagues! I have a client who decided to launch a separate domain so they could offer their content translated for other countries. Each country (except the US/English) content lives in its own country folder as follows: client.com/01/02/zh
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch
client.com/01/02/tw etc. The problem is that they post the content in US/English on this domain too. It does NOT have its own folder, but exists righth after the date (as in the above example) Oh, and the content is the same as on their "main" domain so google likes to index that sometimes vs. the original client on the domain where we want the traffic to go. SO, is there a way to say "hey google, please index the US content only on the main domain, but continue to index the translated content in these folders on this totally separate domain?" Thank you so much in advance.0 -
Change URL or use Canonicals and Redirects?
We just completed a conclusive a/b test on a client's landing page. The new page saw a 30% bump in conversions, yay! Now what? Option 1: Change the url of the new page to that of the old page, retire the old page. Option 2: Redirect the old page and anything that was pointing to it to the new page, make the new page the canonical. I'm afraid of option 1 because I think Google's WTF penalty will be a bit harsher than option 2, but I wanted to sanity check that here. Any thoughts or experienced advice would be very appreciated!
Technical SEO | | LindsayDayton0 -
Google not using redirect
We have a GEO-IP redirect in place for our domain, so that users are pointed to the subfolder relevant for their region, e.g: Visit example.com from the UK and you will be redirected to example.com/uk This works fine when you manually type the domain into your browser, however if you search for the site and come to example.com, you end up at example.com I didn't think this was too much of an issue but our subfolders /uk and /au are not getting ranked at all in Google, even for branded keywords. I'm wondering if the fact that Google isn't picking up the redirect means that the pages aren't being indexed properly? Conversely our US region (example.com/us) is being ranked well. Has anyone encountered a similar issue?
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Using 302 redirect for SEO
Hello, I'm in charge of SEO for an information website on which articles are only accessible if you have a login and password. Most of the natural links we get point to our subscribers' subomain : subscribers.mywebsite.com/article1 If they follow these natural links, visitors who are not logged get redirected (302) to www.mywebsite.com/article1 on which there is an extract of the article and they can request a free test subscription to read the end of the article. My goal is to optimize SEO for the www.mywebsite.com/article1 page. Does this page benefit from the links I get to the subscribers.mywebsite.com/article1 page or are theses links lost in terms of SEO? Thanks for your help, Sylvain
Technical SEO | | Syl200 -
Redirects in site map
I have a site with the ace/sef ( creates friendly URLS) in a large data base site. It creates a site map dynamically. Yet I realize one issue which I am trying to think through. I recently changed my urls to include an ID number example: homepage/houses/1134-big-blue-house The prior url was: homepage/houses/big-blue-house the original url above redirects to the new one with the ID like I want. However the site map has both URLS in it which go to same page I am not sure but it seems rather stupid to have the new URL and OLD redirected URL in the site map. Yet beside stupid I am wondering if this is duplicate content and will cause a penalty from the google bot. What is your opinion ?
Technical SEO | | aimiyo0 -
Questions about Redirects
Hi, I am trying to make sure that I can determine if a site has a 301 redirect set up to redirect the site from domain.com to www.domain.com and am hoping that you can confirm the following for me, or let me know if I am off track: is http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ a reliable way to check if a 301 redirect is set up? is Screaming Frog SEO Spider a good tool to use to see if a redirect is in place? if I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com, I should only get results for the site being indexed, not for the site that has the 301 redirect set up, right? For example, if www.domain.com is set up to redirect to domain.com, then I should get no search results for site:www.domain.com and only show indexed pages for domain.com. If I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com and get results for both, then does this mean that the redirect is not set up? if a redirect is set up from www.domain.com to domain.com, should the crawl report should only show one page crawled on www.domain.com? if a crawl report shows same number of pages for www.domain.com as for domain.com, does that mean that redirect is not set up properly? Thanks in advance for your help! Carolina
Technical SEO | | csmm0 -
.EDU via a 301 Redirect?
I recently received a link to my website from an .edu. However, the way they configured it was they pointed the link to one of their internal pages and then made that page 301 to my website. Is there anyway to gain any link juice from that sort of link?
Technical SEO | | gundogs0 -
301 Redirect?
Sometimes I want to redirect pages on my site. Like a search result: http://www.inthelighturns.com/memorials/catalogsearch/result/?q=hearts to a page designed for what they're searching for: http://www.inthelighturns.com/hearts.html There's no real worry about transferring page rank and this may not be a permanent redirect. Just a "I want this page to show this page for some time" kind of redirect. What's the best solution? Thanks Tyler
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0