Canonical tags required when redirecting?
-
Hello,
My client bought a new domain and he wants it to be the main domain of his company. His current domain though has been online for 10 years and ranks pretty well on a few keywords. I feel it is necessary to redirect the old domain to the new one to take advantage of its ranking and avoid any broken links.
The sites are exactly the same. Same sections and same content. Is it necessary to place canonical tags on one of the sites to avoid duplicate content/sites?
Any thoughts?
Thanks
-
There are number of other signals you can send the search engines to try to speed up indexing of the new site, Eblan.
- once new site is live, resubmit xml sitemap to both Google And Bing Webmaster Tools
- use Fetch as Googlebot and Fetch as Bingbot on each Webmaster Tools to crawl and submit the most important pages from each of the most important sections of the site
- earn some new links to the pages of the new site (social media is especially useful for this - remember to update address in all SM profiles)
- request that high-value links pointing to old site are updated to new site (this can take some outreach to other webmasters - start this process well before the new site is to go live).
Hope that helps?
Paul
P.S. Here's an extensive SEOMoz post on the steps to implement and monitor a domain migration. And here's a great migration checklist infographic. You're going to want to get as much of this right as possible, as there can be considerable risk when doing this kind of major change
-
Hey Paul,
Thanks a lot for the info, to be honest I didn't even consider that. saved my life there.
And I hope Google doesn't take long to index the new domain.
Cheers!
-
Welcome, Eblan. Also, don't forget to use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools as an additional signal to Google for the domain change.
Paul
-
Thanks a lot Paul and Mike!
Sorry for the late response.
Yes, the new domain is all about rebranding. Also, their old domain was too long.
-
If you use 301 (permanent) redirects, there's no need for canonicals on the old pages because as far as the search engines are concerned, you're telling them the old pages no longer even exist. In fact, done properly, you can actually remove the old site altogether after a month or 6 weeks of the redirects being in place. (You point the old domain to the new site and place the redirects in the new site's .htaccess file)
This kind of move can be a big deal for a site that's been around for 10 years. Hopefully there's a compelling reason for wanting to change the domain name? Business rebranding, for example?
Paul
-
If you're 301 redirecting everything to proper, relevant alternative pages on the other site then there's no reason to canonicalize the page.
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
-
HTTPS 301 Redirect Question
Hi, I've just migrated our previous site (siteA) to our new url (siteB) and I've setup 301 redirects from the old url (siteA) to the new (siteB). However, the old url operated on https and users who try to go to the old url with https (https://siteA.com) receive a message that the server cannot be reached, while the users who go to http://siteA.com are redirected to siteB. Is there a way to 301 redirect https traffic? Also, from an SEO perspective if the site and all the references on Google search are https://siteA.com does a 301 redirect of http pass the domain authority, etc. or is https required? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | opstart0 -
Multilingual Redirection
Hey there awesome Mozzers, I have a site that it automatically redirects people by using geolocation ( i know that probably is not good ) to the various languages of the site. I just wanted to know Is 301 or 302 the best option? ( I've heard that for language re-directions 302 is the best case scenario ) My main page for example is www.example.com and it automatically redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en for any language that is not there. What is the best case scenario? Leave it to redirect to /en or just leave it go to the root page www.example.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
301s Or Stick With Canonical?
Hello all! A nice interesting one for you on this fine Friday... I have some pages which are accessible by 2 different urls - This is for user experience allowing the user to get to these pages in two different ways. To keep Google happy we have a rel canonical so that Google only sees one of these urls to avoid duplicates. After some SEO work I need to change both of these urls (on around 1,000 pages). Is the best way to do this... To 301 every old url to every new url Or... To not worry as I will just point the indexed pages to the new rel canonical? Any ideas or suggestions would be brilliant. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Google Indexing Duplicate URLs : Ignoring Robots & Canonical Tags
Hi Moz Community, We have the following robots command that should prevent URLs with tracking parameters being indexed. Disallow: /*? We have noticed google has started indexing pages that are using tracking parameters. Example below. http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/original-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table/1149.html http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/original-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table/1149.html?ec=affee77a60fe4867 These pages are identified as duplicate content yet have the correct canonical tags: https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oakfurnitureland.co.uk%2Ffurniture%2Foriginal-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table%2F1149.html&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oakfurnitureland.co.uk%2Ffurniture%2Foriginal-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table%2F1149.html&gs_l=hp.3..0i10j0l9.4201.5461.0.5879.8.8.0.0.0.0.82.376.7.7.0....0...1c.1.58.hp..3.5.268.0.JTW91YEkjh4 With various affiliate feeds available for our site, we effectively have duplicate versions of every page due to the tracking query that Google seems to be willing to index, ignoring both robots rules & canonical tags. Can anyone shed any light onto the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBGlobalSEO0 -
Too many 301 redirects?
Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website. These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website? If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
H1 Tags and HTML5
I have read that now you can have multiple h1 tags on a page without it negatively impacting SEO. Previously it was advised to only have 1 h1 tag on a page. Example: with the new semantic mark up you could have separate h1 tags for the header, article, aside and footer. Is this really the case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Canonical Tags & Search Bots
Does anyone know for sure if search engine bots still crawl links on a page whose canonical tags are set to a different page? So in short, would it be similar to a no-index follow? Thanks! -Margarita
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
Proper use and coding of rel = "canonical" tag
I'm working on a site that has pages for many wedding vendors. There are essentially 3 variations of the page for each vendor with only slightly different content, so they're showing up as "duplicate content" in my SEOmoz Campaign. Here's an example of the 3 variations: http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161 http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=messageWrite http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=writeReview Because of this, we placed a rel="canoncial" tag in the second 2 pages to try to fix the problem. However, the coding does not seem to validate in the w3 html validator. I can't say I understand html well enough to understand the error the validator is pointing out. We also added a the following to the second 2 types of pages <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> Am I employing this tag correctly in this case? Here is a snippet of the code below. <html> <head> <title>Reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MAtitle> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="[/includes/style.css](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/includes/style.css)"> <link href="[http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161)" rel="canonical" /> <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffreytrull1
<meta name="keywords" content="Astonishing Event, Inc, Somerset Massachusetts, Massachusetts Wedding Wedding Planners Directory, Massachusetts weddings, wedding Massachusetts ">
<meta name="description" content="Get information and read reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MA. Astonishing Event, Inc appears in the directory of Somerset MA wedding Wedding Planners on WeddingReportsMA.com."> <script src="[http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js](view-source:http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js)" type="text/javascript">script> <script type="text/javascript"> _uacct = "UA-173959-2"; urchinTracker(); script> head>0