Canonical tag, CNAME and 301 redirect
-
I have a website with a couple of domains pointing to one IP address. Let's say I have two domains www.example.com and www.example.ca
I also see during my SEO analysis that the example.com and the www.example.com (same for the example.ca and the www.example.ca) are triggering server responses.
How do I deal with this issue for best SEO. Canonical links? CNAME, or 301 redirects? thanks
-
Oh yes... it was a mistyping from my part, sorry
-
Gianluca, thanks for your time. Before I ask my web host to do this one point of clarification. In step 2 you mention redirect of example.com to www.example.com Since www.example.ca is my focus should this be example.ca to www.example.ca or is it correct as stated?
-
It always better to do a 301... also because exists also Bing as a search engine, and it does not know what you have done in GWT
-
thanks very much. As suggested above I just went to google webmaster tools and did specify www.example.com and www.example.ca as the preferred domains. Do I still need to do 301 redirects as well or just a redirect from www.example.com to www.example.ca
-
301 all the other versions to the www.example.ca domain.
I mean...
- redirect 301 the .com domain to the .ca domain (this will take care both of sub-domain and root domain)
- redirect 301 example.com to www.example.com via .htaccess
If you don't do it you have a massive duplication issue... being www.example.ca stronger in link building, it is normal that the other (which are dupes) doesn't go well.
-
all four (www.example.com, example.com, www.example.ca and example.ca) have same content. I have focused all of my SEO efforts on the www.example.ca version. It now ranks well and has good authority and PR but I am concerned about the other versions. I though of adding a canonical tag to the header of the pages on the website making the www.example.ca version the canonical version and then doing 301 redirects (Do I redirect the www.example.com to www.example.ca and then redirect the example.ca to the www.example.ca or is there more to this?). I can easily go the cname route with my server host but I had heard that a 301 is better. Does this added info add clarity to what I am asking? thanks very much for your answers and time til now
-
First of all you have to choose what u are going to use www or no-www, then stick to this! I suggest the www version as most of the people use this when typing in urls directly in their browser.
Then go to your Google Webmaster Tools and set your preferred domain to your choice.
Last but not least make sure you have a redirect for the traffic that does use url without www... You can do this with an .htaccess file. This is a small text file that can handle your redirects.
I don't quite understand the other part, do all the domains share the same content? If so, you should use those canonical tags to indicate where the original content comes from...
-
Delete this for double posting (sorry)
-
In fact that's the way to have just the sub-domain www. appearing online.
And, sorry, I don't really understand the .ca e .com question... does those domains show the same content. In that case one of the two (.com if you target public worldwide or .ca if you target only Canada) should be redirected 301 to the other.
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
-
Understanding Redirects and Canonical Tags in SEO: A Complex Case
Hi everyone, nothing serious here, i'm just playing around doing my experiments 🙂
Technical SEO | | chueneke
but if any1 of you guys understand this chaos and what was the issue here, i'd appreciate if you try to explain it to me. I had a page "Linkaufbau" on my website at https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau. My .htaccess file contains only basic SEO stuff: # removed ".html" using htaccess RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ (.*)\.html\ HTTP RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ $1 [R=301,L] # internally added .html if necessary RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$ RewriteRule (.*) $1\.html [L] # removed "index" from directory index pages RewriteRule (.*)/index$ $1/ [R=301,L] # removed trailing "/" if not a directory RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$ RewriteRule (.*)/ $1 [R=301,L] # Here’s the first redirect: RedirectPermanent /index / My first three questions: Why do I need this rule? Why must this rule be at the top? Why isn't this handled by mod_rewrite? Now to the interesting part: I moved the Linkaufbau page to the SEO folder: https://chriseo.de/seo/linkaufbau and set up the redirect accordingly: RedirectPermanent /linkaufbau /seo/linkaufbau.html I deleted the old /linkaufbau page. I requested indexing for /seo/linkaufbau in the Google Search Console. Once the page was indexed, I set a canonical to the old URL: <link rel="canonical" href="https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau"> Then I resubmitted the sitemap and requested indexing for /seo/linkaufbau again, even though it was already indexed. Due to the canonical tag, the page quickly disappeared. I then requested indexing for /linkaufbau and /linkaufbau.html in GSC (the old, deleted page). After two days, both URLs were back in the serps:: https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau.html this is the new page /seo/linkaufbau
b14ee095-5c03-40d5-b7fc-57d47cf66e3b-grafik.png This is the old page /linkaufbau
242d5bfd-af7c-4bed-9887-c12a29837d77-grafik.png Both URLs are now in the search results and all rankings are significantly better than before for keywords like: organic linkbuilding linkaufbau kosten linkaufbau service natürlicher linkaufbau hochwertiger linkaufbau organische backlinks linkaufbau strategie linkaufbau agentur Interestingly, both URLs (with and without .html) redirect to the new URL https://chriseo.de/seo/linkaufbau, which in turn has a canonical pointing to https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau (without .html). In the SERPs, when https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau is shown, my new, updated snippet is displayed. When /linkaufbau.html is shown, it displays the old, deleted page that had already disappeared from the index. I have now removed the canonical tag. I don't fully understand the process of what happened and why. If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful. Best regards,
Chris0 -
301 Redirects
Looking for the best way to do the following. Business has changed its name, and has also become a corporate store. The old domain name is now no longer needed as a website page has been created inside the main corporate site. Obviously i dont want to loose all the traffic that we had and want to redirect them but there is a problem, that im unable to redirect the old domain to the new one due to office 365 installed on the hosting platform, and the old emails will need to run for another 6 months. I can remove the old site and put a landing page up, but i still need to redirect all the pages to the new site, and there is approx 50+ of them. My main question is i currently have atleast 50+ redirects already in there due to seo changes over the years, some would go back atleast 5 years, whats a safe amount of time that i can remove the older redirects And am i going about this the right way so i dont loose all the hard work on rankings etc
Technical SEO | | Dunjoko0 -
301 redirection for e-commerce website
Hi moz community, I am the web agency for a e-commerce website. Its current domain is https://www.liquorland.co.nz but now all the e-commerce part will be moved to a sub-domain https://shop.liquorland.co.nz. There are thousands of e-commerce current being indexed in Google (i.e., 15,500) plus they also have a mobile version of the page like /mobile/default.aspx. Is it necessary to 301 redirect all the pages? We are afraid it may slow down the website because the request will go through thousands of filters. Is it OK to just redirect the main categories? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | russellbrown0 -
Use 301 or rel=canonical
I have a page on my site that is showing in search results at #9. I created another page on my site with the search term in the url. Wondering if I 301 or rel=canonical. Thank you, Kerry
Technical SEO | | Hydraulicgirl0 -
Can new content be added to a url which has a 301 redirect?
I am working on a site which is currently being redesigned. The home page currently ranks highly for relevant search terms, although on the new site the content on this page will be removed. The solution I was considering, to preserve rankings, was to move the content on the home page to a new url, and use a 301 redirect to help preserve rankings for that particular page. The question I have therefore, is am I able to add new content to the home page, and have this page freshly indexed accordingly? Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks, Matt.
Technical SEO | | MatthewA0 -
Canonical tag in the Michael Torbert SEO plugin
I am confused about a canonical tag that appears in the header section of a site that uses the WordPress All in One SEO plugin by Michael Torbert. That is a very popular one. It says, I thought that telling Google that a page is canonical means "Don't index this one, it is not the primary page." But in fact, this is the primary page because when you go to www.xquisitevents.com it redirects to xquisitevents.com. Is this done properly or not? Ditto for all the other pages, i.e. xquisitevents.com/about-us has a canonical tag in the wordpress plugin, etc. Which is the real primary page? And does the primary page correctly have the canonical tag in the plugin?
Technical SEO | | BridgetGibbons0 -
301 redirect dropped page rank
Hi, We have a www domain that I have changed to a non www domain. The www domain had been in place for some time and had a good page rank, PR4. After this change the page rank dropped significantly (PR0, and now recently back to PR2) despite it being a 301 redirect which I thought "should" carry over the page rank. Yes, I am aware I should have just left it be. Hind sight 20/20 .. ya ya ya 🙂 My questions Is the 301 the correct method for this? Why did the page rank drop despite the 301? Should we go back to the www domain at this point? Thanks Kris
Technical SEO | | adriot0 -
301 Redirects - SEO Benefit?
Hello, Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store. We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order. We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site. Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? We were also kind of penalized by Panda. Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).
Technical SEO | | airnwater0