Canonicalization interact with 301 redirects?
-
This is a interesting one I think.
I have recently taken down some product list pages from our website www.towelsrus.co.uk. These have canonicalisation in place to deal with pages where a query string is generated depending on the search criteria.
When I put a 301 redirect in place the target page redirects fine, however webmaster tools then errors with 404 on all canonicalised pages.
Is this correct behaviour and how do we get over this?
-
If I'm (we're) understanding your situation correctly, then I'd have to agree with Mike. You should 301-redirect all of the versions, not "chain" the canonical to a 301. That's going to produce very unpredictable results at best.
-
Just remember that a canonical is a signal not a directive. Google and other search engines can choose whether or not to listen to your signal. So make sure those "duplicate" pages need to exist as they are currently. In some cases it may make more sense to either update the page with fresh, original, and relevant content or to have the page marked NoIndex depending on the situation.
-
Thanks chaps. The other issue it also flags up is duplicate data as now no canonicalisation is in place. double whammy. I'll get the web company to allow us to update these for the future.
-
I'm not 100% sure why its throwing 404s because I've never had that exact problem when doing the same thing on any sites I work on but I agree with TextMarketing on updating the canonicals. If you originally had Page 1, Page 2, and Page 3 canonicalized to Page A and now Page A has been 301'd to Page B, you should update Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3 to have their canonical tags pointing to Page B instead of the 301 page.
-
If I'm understanding this right, you need to update your canonical tags with the pages the 301 is redirecting to.
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
-
Will 301 Redirects Slow Page Speed?
We have a lot of subdomains that we are switching to subfolders and need to 301 redirect all the pages from those subdomains to the new URL. We have over 1000 that need to be implemented. So, will 301 redirects slow the page speed regardless of which URL the user comes through? Or, as the old urls are dropped from Google's index and bypassed as the new URLs take over in the SERPs, will those redirects then have no effect on page speed? Trying to find a clear answer to this and have yet to find a good answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
301 redirect impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Is 1:1 301 redirect required on indexed URL when restructing URL even if the new URL is canonicalized?
Hello folks, We are restructuring some URLS which forms a fair chunk of the content of the domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB17
These content are auto generated rather than manually created unlike other parts of the website. The same content is currently accessible from two URLs: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn The URL 1 uses the URL 2 as the canonical url and it has worked allright since Moz does
not show the two as duplicate of each other. Google has also indexed the canonical URL although
there is still a few 'URL 1s' which were indexed before the canonical was implemented. The updated URL structure will look like something like this: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn It would be great to have just a single URL but a few business requirement prevents
us from having just the canonical URL only even with the new structure. Since we will still have two URLs to access the same content and we were wondering
whether we will need to do a 1:1 301 redirect on the current URLs or since there will be canonical URL
(/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn),
we won't need to worry about doing the 1:1 redirect on the the indexed content? Please note that the content will still be accessible from the OLD URL (unless 301ed of course). If it is advisable to do a 1:1 301 redirect this is what we intend to do: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn /autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn Any advice/suggestions would be greated appreciated. Thank you.0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
Should you cache redirects?
I would like to know what fellow SEO people think, should you cache a redirect? Problems I see with caching redirects are meta refreshes and there might be a slow down in page load, but is it a big issue? Should we cache redirects? Do pages get indexed more if you cache redirects? Our ecommerce product pages are all dynamic, and currently we cache redirects but i'm seeing a lot of meta refresh issues. Another area that cropped up is that, the redirect doesn't pass on query parameters. Our system dumps URLs and they are redirected to SEO ones, but the redirect doesn't pass on parameters like Google Analytic tracking tags. What are your thoughts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Redirection question
How would I redirect this URL: http://www.members.mysite.com/ to this URL: http://www.mysite.com/ ? I cant figure it out
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Effect of 301 redirect to a relative url to homepage?
One of our new clients recently encountered a site-wide ranking drop for many keywords and I'm pretty confident regarding their link profile as to being 98% legit. Background: 1. Client full site is https, and all http pages are 301 redirected to their https counterpart 2. Client has ~50 links partners (all legitimate sites + schools etc) links to client with urls such as www.example.com/portal/123.aspx that redirects to www.example.com. 3. Client homepage 301 redirects from www.example.com to www.example.com/default.aspx and then 301 redirects to the relative url "/Home.aspx". 4. Client launched some testing with Google website optimizer tool. ~1-2 months ago. Symptoms: 1. Rankings dropped for basically many/all 30-40+ keywords by ~15 positions 2. Seomoz reports close to a double of existing pages + (600+) duplicate content in the same date range. Webmasters only report 80 duplicate titles though. 3. Domain authority by seomoz reduced a bit + backlinks recorded by seomoz to the website nearly halved in the past 2 months. I'm not sure if I narrowed this towards the right direction, and it isn't clear when the relative url 301 redirect was implemented: 1. The 301 redirect to the relative page (www.example.com/default.aspx to "/home.aspx") is accounting for the loss of links recorded by seomoz. 2. The ~50 links the client currently use (www.example.com/portal.123.aspx 301 redirecting to www.example.com, also relative) as a tracking tool is being considered 301 redirect abuse. 3. Maybe something went wrong with the usage of google optimizer tool for SEO purposes? Visitor traffic to each of the tested pages looked fine. I would greatly appreciate any advice/insights on what I might be missing in terms of direction / factors. Thanks! Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sixspokemedia0 -
How to Redirect
What is the htaccess code to redirect everything in a directory to a file? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0