A 301 redirect to a page with a rel canonical to a page with a 301 question...
-
MOZ registers thousands of DC and Duplicate titles on a Drupal site which has a little strange setup.
Example:
www.1234.com/en-us 301 redirects to www.realsite.com/en-us which has a rel canonical to www.1234.com which 301 redirects to www.realsite.com.
If you're still with me I thank you.
My question is since MOZ registers errors, if indeed the rel canonical isn't recognized due to a 301 redirect? -
I agree it's a strange setup and also suspected it would be ignored. I appreciate the answers and will see if there is a way to hardcode a way out of it.
-
It's really difficult to tell what Google will do in these situations, and it's generally a bad idea to chain redirects and caonicals, but I suspect the canonicals will be ignored. The bigger problem here is that the 301 is basically saying that "realsite.com" is canonical, but then the canonical is saying that "1234.com" is canonical. Even as a human, the logic doesn't make any sense, unless I'm missing something. You may see unpredictable results (and unpredictable is usually bad).
-
Hi Phillip,
Check out this great reference by Dr Pete: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
In a nutshell (if I can get my head around it) rel canonical is 'suggesting' to google which version of a page should be indexed for search purposes while 301 redirects are basically taking you to the canonical version of the page already and therefore is more final in regards both users and bots.
The set up you have (assuming that you want to consolidate 1234.com to realsite.com permanently) has a problem in that you are telling google that realsite.com/en-us has a canonical of 1234.com (which is just a suggestion, not a permanent redirect) and therefore yes the canonical as you say is not being reognised in the way you expect it to be because it is indeed just a suggestion, not a followed link if you see what I mean. I think 301 redirecting the realsite/en-us to realsite.com is the only thing that will be a permanent solution.
Hope I got that right, maybe someone else can chime in....
-
Hi Lynn thank you for your response.
Yes a horrible setup but has something to do with Drupal URL architecture.
In Moz it show's www.realsite.com/en-us and www.realsite.com as the culprits so it seems to ignore the rel cannonical from www.realsite.com/en-us to www.1234.comI might ask the Moz team if Googlebot treats this the same way.
Again thank you for your answer.
-
That is just nasty! Which domain is showing the duplicates? I assume the realsite.com and it is showing duplicates between the / and the /en-us versions? I cannot say if moz is registering the errors in the same way exactly as a search bot would register them, but you are asking for trouble with it.
Can you not simplify the chain? It seems to me that the cross domain canonical is pointless in this case. You have all 1234.com urls 301 to their realsite.com equivalents. OK. If needed canonical the realsite.com/en-us to realsite.com or probably better yet 301 redirect it also. It might need a bit of technical fiddling to get it all set up, but surely there must be a way!
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
-
Should I noindex user-created fundraising pages?
Hello Moz community! I work for a nonprofit where users are able to create their own fundraising pages on the website for supporters to directly donate. Some of them are rarely used, others get updated frequently by the host. There are likely a ton of these on our site. Moz crawl says we have ~54K pages, and when I do a "site:[url]" search on Google, 90% of the first 100 results are fundraising pages. These are not controlled by our staff members, but I'm wondering if meta noindexing these pages could have a big effect on our SEO rankings. Has anyone tried anything similar or know if this strategy could have legs for our site? My only concern is whether users wouldn't be able to find their fundraising page in our Google CSE implemented on the website. Any insight you fine folks could provide would be greatly appreciated!
Moz Pro | | Adam_Paris1 -
Duplicate Pages
Hello, we have an issue which I'm hoping someone can help with. Our Moz system is saying that this page http://www.indigolittle.com/fees/ Is a duplicate page. We use this page purely for mobiles and we have added code to say This has been on for over a month now however Moz is still picking the page us as a High Priority Issue.
Moz Pro | | popcreativeltd0 -
How to Optimize a Home Page?
Can anyone advise on what is the best way to optimise the home page? Many websites I see include the target(focus) keywords from other pages on the home page. Is this self competition? "Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization- It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site" If an e-commerce website has 4 levels in the SEO architecture. Home Page, Brand Pages(Category), Range pages(sub-category) and individual product pages. It would seem that the main keywords would be within the category(brands) level of a website. However many websites I see include these on the home page as well. Could someone please clarify this? I do not recall seeing the report card saying Self-Cannibalization when these keywords(category level) are listed on the home page. However I could be wrong, Please could someone advise on what SEO MOZs recommendations are for best practise on optimizing a home page so that it does not compete with category pages, or other pages on the website. Thanks
Moz Pro | | WMA0 -
Seomoz crawling filtered pages
Hi, I just checked an seo campaign we started last week, so I opened seomoz to see the crawl diagnostics. Lot's of duplicate content & duplicate titles showing up, but that's because Rogerbot is crawling all of the filtered pages as well. How do I exclude these pages from being crawled? /product/brand-x/3969?order=brand&sortorder=ASC
Moz Pro | | nvs.nim
/product/brand-x/3969?order=popular&sortorder=ASC
/product/brand-x/3969?order=popular&sortorder=DESC&page=10
/product/brand-x/3969?order=popular&sortorder=DESC&page=110 -
One page per campaign?
Not quite sure if I read correctly, but is it correct that one campaign tracks only one page of my site? So if I wanted to track something like a services page, this would require a second campaign?
Moz Pro | | GroundFloorSEO0 -
Have I got Rel Canonical or not?
I have 180 warnings of rel=canonical. The exact wording says this: Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical. First - I don't know what that means - is that a good thing of bad thing? Second - Because of the above question, Im not sure if I have it or should have or it do have it but shouldn't. Which should I have? What should it look like? How do I fix it? Also, I have notices that say 'issue: 301 redirect' and a line about what a 301 redirect is. Again, do I have it, or not have it, should I have it? Do I have it but shouldn't?
Moz Pro | | borderbound0 -
Crawling a website with redirects
Hi, I started a campaign for a website which uses multiple redirects before showing the real content. in the crawling report only one page is crawled. Is there a way to let the crawler pass the redirects to get usefull reports? The website is www.cegeka.be Thank you
Moz Pro | | Cegeka0 -
Page Authority vs Domain Authority
I'm using the site explorer to compare a potential clients site against 4 others, in an incredibly competitive market. Each of their competitiors has a higher page authority (on the home page) than their domain authority. This is untrue for the clients site. (which have much lower metrics all round) Any input as to what this means/says about their competitors who I would guess (looking at some of their backlink profiles) have done some failry widespread grey hat stuff in the past. (Though haven't we all 😉 )
Moz Pro | | FDC0