301 or Rel=canonical
-
Should I use a 301 redirect for redirect mywebsite.com to www.mywebsite.com or use a rel=canonical??
Thanks!
-
We use a rewrite rule to do this (301) because we want to keep our analytics easier to manage.
So for example if I have blog.example.com/, www.example.com/, and example.com/ all tracked under the same analytics setup, and I am not taking the hostname into account then all of my "/" pageviews are pooled together and I don't know if they are blog or www pageviews.
So once I tell analytics to add the hostname to pageviews they come across as blog.example.com/ and www.example.com/, but now I will see www.example.com/ and example.com/ as two different pages in my content reports.
So then I need to have the 301 so my data is consolidated correctly.
This is why I suggest using 301s where you can. This can get tricky if you have a ton of folders and index pages for those folders, but you should at least be doing this for your home page as it will make your reporting life MUCH easier in the long run.
Especially if you aren't tracking across subdomains now, but will want to in the future. If you set it up this way now it will save you some headaches.
Hope that helps!
-
If you can do a 301, go for the 301. As far as PageRank is concerned, there's not much of a difference. See Matt Cutts on exactly this topic.
cheers
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
-
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 redirect and search engines
How long until 301 redirects get recognized by search engines? I noticed my link on Google isn't forwarding over to my new domain even after the 301 redirect. If I go to the site directly, the 301 redirect works. Anyone know how long it takes for search engines to pick it up? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | timeintopixels0 -
Do I need to 301 EVERY page?
I have a client who is consolidating multiple EMD domains into a single domain for SEO reasons and for practical reason, like not having to produce content and perform SEO for 20 domains. My question is this: Do I need to 301 every single page from these old EMD domains? I bill this client hourly and while I could take the time to write 301s for literally thousands of pages I feel that this might not be the best use of his money, that I could strategically 301 the landing pages that get traffic and then route everything else to the new root domain...thoughts? I've researched this and have not been able to hear a really strong opinion yet.
Technical SEO | | BrianJGomez0 -
Canonical tags
How hard is it to put in Canonical tags on a webpage? My web guy didn't do it because he put in redirects in place for all old URLs and all content
Technical SEO | | Boodreaux
(except error pages and advanced searches) should have a unique URL. By not having canonical tags does it lose link juice? Not sure if that question makes sense. 🙂 Poo1 -
Canonical URL Issue
Hi Everyone, I'm fairly new here and I've been browsing around for a good answer for an issue that is driving me nuts here. I tried to put the canonical url for my website and on the first 5 or 6 pages I added the following script SEOMoz reported that there was a problem with it. I spoke to another friend and he said that it looks like it's right and there is nothing wrong but still I get the same error. For the URL http://www.cacaniqueis.com.br/video-caca-niqueis.html I used the following: <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.cacaniqueis.com.br/video-caca-niqueis.html" /> Is there anything wrong with it? Many thanks in advance for the attention to my question.. 🙂 Alex
Technical SEO | | influxmedia0 -
A rel="canonical" to www.homepage.com/home.aspx Hurts my Rank?
Hello, The CMS that I use makes 3 versions of the homepage:
Technical SEO | | EvolveCreative
www.homepage.com/home.aspx homepage.com homepage.com/default.aspx By default the CMS is set to rel=canonical all versions to the www.homepage.com/home.aspx version. If someone were to link to a website they most likely aren't going to link to www.homepage.com/home.aspx, they'll link to www.homepage.com which makes that link juice flow through the canonical to www.homepage.com/home.aspx right? Why make that extra loop at all? Wouldn't that be splitting the juice? I know 301's loose 1-5 % juice, but not sure about canonical. I assume it works the same way? Thanks! http://yoursiteroot/0 -
Help with Rel Canonical on Wordpress?
Crawl Diagnostics is showing a lot of Rel Canonical warnings, I've installed Wordpress SEO by Joose De Valk and Home Canonical URL plugins without success. Any ideas? I'm getting a lot of URL's that I thought I blocked from being indexed, such as author pages, category pages, etc. I'm also getting stuff like "recessionitis.com/?homeq=recent" and "recessionitis.com/page/2/", those pages are similar to my homepage. I thought those plugins were suppose to automatically clean things up.. anyone use these plugins that have any helpful hints?
Technical SEO | | 10JQKAs0 -
301 Redirect Issue
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects: Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one... So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense? The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog." Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!! Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | EntrustSEO0