Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it better to use XXX.com or XXX.com/index.html as canonical page
-
Is it better to use 301 redirects or canonical page? I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc.
-
Glad you got it sorted out. If you're 301-redirecting a lot of domains, I'd suggest doing it gradually or maybe holding off on the lowest-quality domains. Google can see a massive set of redirects as a bit of a red flag (too many people have bought up cheap domains and 301-redirected to consolidate the link equity). If the domains are really all closely related or if you're only talking about a handful (<5) then it's probably not a big issue.
-
I think things may be sorted out, but I am not sure. I actually put in 301-redirects from a bunch of domains that I own to this new domain, the content of which will eventually replace my main domain. But, I need to get the domain properly set up and optimized before I move it to my primary domain to replace the ancient web site. At that time, I will also redirect this site to the new, old site.
I used to have Google ad-words tied to some of the domains that I 301-redirected to the new web site that I am building. Those were just a waste of money, however, so I put them on hold. I also had a lot of problems with semel and buttons for web bouncing off those pages that I re-directed. I put in .htaccess commands to stop those spam sites and that seems to work.
-
Google seems to be indexing 30-ish pages, but when I look at the cached home-page, I'm actually seeing the home-page of http://rfprototype.com/. Did you recently change domains or 301-redirect the old site? The cache data is around Christmas (after the original question was posted), so I think we're missing part of the puzzle here.
-
So, I think I may have had things wrong. For one thing, it seems like moz and Google are only indexing 2 pages, while the site index shows something like 80 pages. (I suspect an image is a page, and there are a lot of images. But, there are about 10 or 12 distinct pages at the moment. Also, Google and moz do not seem to show the correct key words in any sense like they should, leading me to think that they were just spidering 2 pages. I don't know why. I added the following to my index.html header:
and
I assume I put them in the correct place. I also believe I don't need canonical pages anywhere else.
Should these changes to my index.html make the proper changes?
-
Yeah, I'd have to concur - all the evidence and case studies I've seen suggest that rel=canonical almost always passes authority (link equity). There are exceptions, but honestly, there are exceptions with 301s, too.
I think the biggest difference, practically, is the impact on human visitors. 301-redirects take people to a new page, whereas canonical tags don't.
-
In terms of rel=canonical that will pass value the same as a 301 redirect - for evidence have a look here:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
"Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement."
See DR Pete's response in this Moz Q&A:
http://moz.com/community/q/do-canonical-tags-pass-all-of-the-link-juice-onto-the-url-they-point-to
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?rd=1
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical
Matts Cutts stated there is not a whole lot of difference between the 301 and the canonical - they will both lose "just a tiny little amount bit, not very much at all" of credit from the referring page.
-
Ok, this is how I look at the situation.
So you have two URLs and the question is either to redirect301 or use canonical? In my opinion 301 is a better solution and this is because it will not only redirect people to the preferred version but the link value as well.
Whereas, with canonicals only search engines will know what is the preferred page but it will not transfer the link value which can help you with organic rankings.
Hope this helps!
-
You would put the canonical link in the index file and I would point that at the xxx.com version rather than the xxx.com/index.html version as people visiting your sites homepage are going to enter the domain and not the specific page so xxx.com rather than xxx.com/index.html.
There are some great articles on Moz explaining all this which I would suggest that you read -
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
Dr Pete also did this post answering common questions on rel=canonical.
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
In terms of 301 redirects and canonicalization both pass the same amount of authority gained by different pages. If you are trying to keep it as clean as possible you need to be careful you don't create an issue redirecting your index file to your domain - here is an old post explaining how moz solved this 301 redirect on an Apache server
http://moz.com/blog/apache-redirect-an-index-file-to-your-domain-without-looping
I personally find that if all your links on your site reference your preferred(canonical) URL for the homepage so in this case xxx.com and you redirect the www version to this or vice versa depending on your preference then you add a canonical in the index.html file pointing at xxx.com in this case unless you prefer to do it the other way round with www.xxx.com for both you will be fine.
Hope this helps
-
I forgot. Of course, there is no xxx.com page, per se. It is actually xxx.com/index.html so if you needed to put the canonical reference on xxx.com, how would you do it?
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
-
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Indexing Issue of Dynamic Pages
Hi All, I have a query for which i am struggling to find out the answer. I unable to retrieve URL using "site:" query on Google SERP. However, when i enter the direct URL or with "info:" query then a snippet appears. I am not able to understand why google is not showing URL with "site:" query. Whether the page is indexed or not? Or it's soon going to be deindexed. Secondly, I would like to mention that this is a dynamic URL. The index file which we are using to generate this URL is not available to Google Bot. For instance, There are two different URL's. http://www.abc.com/browse/ --- It's a parent page.
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia
http://www.abc.com/browse/?q=123 --- This is the URL, generated at run time using browse index file. Google unable to crawl index file of browse page as it is unable to run independently until some value will get passed in the parameter and is not indexed by Google. Earlier the dynamic URL's were indexed and was showing up in Google for "site:" query but now it is not showing up. Can anyone help me what is happening here? Please advise. Thanks0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?
I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
Can you have a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html on the same site?
Thanks in advance for any responses; we really appreciate the expertise of the SEOmoz community! My question: Since the file extensions are different, can a site have both a /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.html both siting at the root domain? For example, we've already put the html sitemap in place here: https://www.pioneermilitaryloans.com/sitemap Now, we're considering adding an XML sitemap. I know standard practice is to load it at the root (www.example.com/sitemap.xml), but am wondering if this will cause conflicts. I've been unable to find this topic addressed anywhere, or any real-life examples of sites currently doing this. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | PioneerServices0 -
De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products. Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers. Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this: 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL. If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL. When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool This would be an example of an old URL:
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark
www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 This would be an example of a new URL:
www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue I have to specific questions: Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above? What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site". And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business. Best regards,
TalkInThePark0 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0 -
Root vs. Index.html
Should I redirect index.html to "/" or vice versa? Which is better for duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | DavetheExterminator0