Is 1:1 301 redirect required on indexed URL when restructing URL even if the new URL is canonicalized?
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Hello folks,
We are restructuring some URLS which forms a fair chunk of the content of the domain.
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-isbnThe 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-isbnIt 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-isbnAny advice/suggestions would be greated appreciated. Thank you.
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If I was in your shoes, even though your canonicals are working (great step #1), I'd be inclined to clean up the URLs are much as possible and 301 any duplicate pages that you can get approval for. You'll always want to have your canonicals coded in regardless. But having less actually pages will save you in other areas - content audits, Google bot and other bots crawl time, space on your server, confusion for customers, etc. Less can be more in this case.
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