Canonicals & 301 Redirects to new Domain
-
We will be changing our domain name soon and I want to make sure I'm not painting myself into a corner. Of course, I want to transfer as much link equity as possible.
Question #1: Do I need to define a canonical from the old domain to the new domain?
Question #2: Do I also need to put 301s in place on the pages with link equity, or is there a way to apply 301s across the entire site on all pages?
Any input would be appreciated greatly!
Thanks!
-
You will want to do the 301 redirect. That is the best way to address a domain name change. You would use a canonical tag if you were keeping both sites live, which isn't best practice. The canonical tag is not necessary when you use the 301 redirect. You will use the canonical tag to set the correct version of your URL, for example, if your set version is abcde.com and not www.abcde.com you will add a canonical tag to the page for abcde.com.
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 the canonical tag for the redirected pages be changed
Hi! Does anyone know if the canonical tag of the old redirected page should be changed, and include the URL of the new destination? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | AnahitG0 -
Removing Multiple 301 Redirects
During my last redesign (and migration to Drupal) some of the updated SEO friendly url's on the new site were misspelled. Rather than updating the 301 redirects to point to the correct page the developer just added an additional 301 redirect. So it was redirected like this website.com/oldpage (301 to) website.com/new-paige (301 to) website.com/new-page Instead of website.com/oldpage (301 to) website.com/new-page I'll be finishing another redesign and updating to https soon, should I remove the redirect to the misspelled domain and just have one 301 from the original page? These multiple redirects have been up for over a year. Thanks for any specific advice!
Technical SEO | | talltrees0 -
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Rel canonical between mirrored domains
Hi all & happy new near! I'm new to SEO and could do with a spot of advice: I have a site that has several domains that mirror it (not good, I know...) So www.site.com, www.site.edu.sg, www.othersite.com all serve up the same content. I was planning to use rel="canonical" to avoid the duplication but I have a concern: Currently several of these mirrors rank - one, the .com ranks #1 on local google search for some useful keywords. the .edu.sg also shows up as #9 for a dirrerent page. In some cases I have multiple mirrors showing up on a specific serp. I would LIKE to rel canonical everything to the local edu.sg domain since this is most representative of the fact that the site is for a school in Singapore but...
Technical SEO | | AlexSG
-The .com is listed in DMOZ (this used to be important) and none of the volunteers there ever respoded to requests to update it to the .edu.sg
-The .com ranks higher than the com.sg page for non-local search so I am guessing google has some kind of algorithm to mark down obviosly local domains in other geographic locations Any opinions on this? Should I rel canonical the .com to the .edu.sg or vice versa? I appreciate any advice or opinion before I pull the trigger and end up shooting myself in the foot! Best regards from Singapore!0 -
CNAME vs 301 redirect
Hi all, Recently I created a website for a new client and my next job is trying to get them higher in Google. I added them in OSE and noticed some strange backlinks. To my surprise the client has about 20 domain names. All automatically poiting to (showing) the same new mainsite now. www.maindomain.nl www.maindomain.be
Technical SEO | | Houdoe
www.maindomain.eu
www.maindomain.com
www.otherdomain.nl
www.otherdomain.com
... Some of these domains have backlinks too (but not so much). I suggested to 301 redirect them all to the main site. Just to avoid duplicate content. But now the webhoster comes into play: "It's a problem, client has only 1 hosting account, blablabla...". They told me they could CNAME the 20 domains to the main domain. Or A-record them to an IP address. This is too technical stuff for me. So my concrete questions are: Is it smart to do anything at all or am I just harming my client? The main site is ranking pretty well now. And some backlinks are from their copy sites (probably because everywhere the logo links to the full mainsite url). Does the CNAME or A-record solution has the same effect as a 301 redirect, from SEO perspective? Many thanks,
Hans0 -
Redirecting Domains
Hi Everybody, My clients owns a lot of domains related to his website. I redirected them to the website. So his website is: www.vallnord.com but if you type Vallnordski, vallnordsnow, etc etc they will go to the website, but they will not change the url and will keep vallnordski, vallnordsnow instead of going to vallnord.com Not very clear actually, so if you have 20 seconds to type them you will see it very clear. I was wondering if this was a good practice or it is better to actually redirect someone completely (If they type vallnordski.com take them to vallnord.com)? Is redirecting a good SEO practice? Regards, Guido.
Technical SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
301 Redirect
The SEOmoz crawl campaign found some 404 errors in my Joomla site poker-brands.ca. So, I figured I would set up 301 redirects in my hosting account to make sure bots don't read that there is a page missing. For example: This link gave a 404 error in the crawl: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager I redirected it to: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pt3-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager-hem-hm2 However, when I visit the first link it doesn't send me to the second link. Am I supposed to get forwarded to the second link now?
Technical SEO | | Uramark0 -
301 redirects inside sitemaps
I am in the process of trying to get google to follow a large number of old links on site A to site B. Currently I have 301 redirects as well a cross domain canonical tags in place. My issue is that Google is not following the links from site A to site B since the links no longer exist in site A. I went ahead and added the old links from site A into site A's sitemap. Unfortunately Google is returning this message inside webmaster tools: When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL. However I do not understand how adding the redirected links from site B to the sitemap in site A will remove the old links. Obviously Google can see the 301 redirect and the canonical tag but this isn't defined in the sitemap as a direct correlation between site A and B. Am I missing something here?
Technical SEO | | jmsobe0