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.
Vanity URLs Canonicalization
-
Hi,
So right now my vanity URLs have a lot more links than my regular homepage. They 301 redirect to the homepage but I'm thinking of canonicalizing the homepage, as well as the mobile page, to the vanity URL. Currently some of my sites have a vanity URL in a SERP and some do not. This is my way of nudging google to list them all as vanity but thought I would get everyone's opinion first.
Thanks!
-
Yeah, they don't explicitly mention 301s. But similar to a 404, a 301ed page is technically also not an "existent URL with good content." It's a permanent move, i.e., that particular URL no longer exists, though the content does exist at a new URL.
Dr. Pete wrote a good post about rel=canonicals a couple years ago that's worth checking out—numbers 3, 7, 9, and 10 in particular.
As far as the lack of consistency in the results, if you're treating all the URLs the same way, it might simply be a time lag. I could see how using 302s for a long period of time would end up showing the vanity URLs in the index. The only way I think you could consistently get a particular URL to display for a result would be to establish it as the official, "canonical" version of the page, whether you do that with 301s or rel=canonical.
-
Also, I read that blog post before but it refers to a 404 not a redirected page. So it doesn't OUTRIGHT say not to do a canonical to a redirected page. It is definitely a loop though and I see the problem in that. I just really wanted an answer to the 301'd page question but I agree that it's not the best idea to do it.
-
Ah ok that's evidence enough not to do it. Ever want to do something and you know it's wrong but you don't know WHY it's wrong and it's hard to find evidence to show it is? That's where I was at. I wanted to set the homepage canonical to the vanity but I knew it treated it like a 301 redirect. My only impulse to do it was that the vanity URLs were appearing in search. Ok so I won't do that.
The only other question is since Google is putting some of the vanity URLs in search and some of the homepage urls in search, is there any way to keep it consistent? It seems like there isn't since Google is disregarding the canonical (which is all to the current homepage and not the vanity) sometimes in replace of the vanity.
-
Okay... well that sounds like a mess.
Your example makes me think of this company powerequipmentdirect.com actually. They have sub-sites across a ton of different domains like mowersdirect.com, chippersdirect.com, etc., and they seem to do well in all of their verticals. So they took a completely different approach to that problem and appear to have had some success with it.
The wording of this has me a little confused though: "I'm hesitant on putting a canonical on a site that is a vanity though and 301 redirecting"
It sounds like you want to put a canonical on "blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble" that points to blenders.com, but then you would 301 blenders.com back to blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble. Sorry if I misunderstood you there, but is that right?
Canonicals are generally treated like 301s. So I think that would almost be like a cross-domain loop, which would probably lead G to disregard the canonical altogether. Canonicals aren't a mandatory order. If Google thinks you screwed it up they just ignore it.
In this post on the Google Webmaster Central blog they mention it's necessary "rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content."
-
The answer is that it's an old jsp site. So it's a long domain that's not good. So say this, say my company does appliances (they don't but let's pretend) and they own refrigerators.com and dryers.com and blenders.com. They have a bad domain structure and have been doing dryers.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=dry for years. This, of course, isn't as easy to link to. Also, to make things worse, they have 302'd dryers.com. So, after changing the response codes from 302 to 301, some of the SERPs started to include the vanity URL (i.e. dryers.com) but didn't include others (i.e. say blenders.com is still blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble). I'd like them to have all the same SERP listing and it's ideal for them to be the vanity (wouldn't you rather dryers.com vs that long ugly URL). Also I know this is not the long term fix (someday it'll all be company.com/dryers but that day is not today).
So my question really is: I'm hesitant on putting a canonical on a site that is a vanity though and 301 redirecting but I have no evidence to back this up. Can you help me find the answer with evidence for this?
-
That sounds like a bad idea to me—almost like you're approaching this inside out. The old Wil Reynolds' concept "real company shit" is a guiding principle here.
"It’s our attempt to take an industry we love and encourage all of us to do the same things REAL COMPANIES DO! Real companies rarely build their business on shortcuts and tricks, yet we as SEO’s were winning so often with shortcuts and tricks." http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/rcs-how-we-do-it-with-a-live-example/
I think, rather than trying to make the most of the link equity that's hitting your vanity URLs, I would question why your home page, i.e., your company/brand is not as good at attracting links as your vanity URLs are.
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
-
Do we lose Backlinks and Domain Authority of URL when we change domain Name?
Have 1 performing domain (Monthly - 4M visitor ) now we want to change domain name ( Brand name like SEOMOZ to Moz ). I have general knowledge about domain changing prevention tips like 301 redirection and other thing. My concern is about backlinks and DA. How can I prevent any lose from SEO Point of view. (backlink lose) Do I need to change all backlink form source or redirection is enough to get all reference traffic from that backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
How to improve PA of Shortened URLs
Why some of shortened urls like bitly/owly/googl has PA>40? I tried everything to improve PA of my shortened urls like facebook shares, retweets and backlinks to them but still i have PA-1. Checkout this URL: https://moz.com/blog/state-of-links in MOZ OSE and you will many 301 links from shortners
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | igains
I asked many seo experts about this but no one answered this question so today subscribed MOZ pro for the solution. Please give me the answer.0 -
URL Masking or Cloaking?
Hi Guy's, On our webshop we link from our menu to categories were we want to rank on in Google. Because the menu is sitewide i guess Google finds the categories in the menu important and meaby let them score better (onside links) The problem that i'm facing with is that we make difference in Gender. In the menu we have: Man and Woman. Links from the menu go to: /categorie?gender=1/ and /category?gender=2/. But we don't want to score on gender but on the default URL. For example: Focus keyword = Shoes Menu Man link: /shoes?gender=1 Menu Woman link: /shoes?gender=2 But we only want to rank on /shoes/. But that URL is not placed in the menu. Every URL with: "?" has a follow noindex. So i was thinking to make a link in the menu, on man and woman: /shoes/, but on mouse down (program it that way) ?=gender. Is this cloaking for Google? What we also could do is make a canonical to the /shoes/ page. But i don't know if we get intern linking value on ?gender pages that have a canonical. Hope it makes senses 🙂 Advises are also welcome, such as: Place al the default URL's in the footer.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Happy-SEO0 -
Duplicate keywords in URL?
Is there such a thing as keyword stuffing URLs? Such as a domain name of turtlesforsale.com having a directory called turtles-for-sale that houses all the pages on the site. Every page would start out with turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/. Good or bad idea? The owner is hoping to capitalize on the keywords of turtles for sale being in the URL twice and ranking better for that reason.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
One page with multiple sections - unique URL for each section
Hi All, This is my first time posting to the Moz community, so forgive me if I make any silly mistakes. A little background: I run a website that for a company that makes custom parts out of specialty materials. One of my strategies is to make high quality content about all areas of these specialty materials to attract potential customers - pretty strait-forward stuff. I have always struggled with how to structure my content; from a usability point of view, I like just having one page for each material, with different subsections covering covering different topical areas. Example: for a special metal material I would have one page with subsections about the mechanical properties, thermal properties, available types, common applications, etc. Basically how Wikipedia organizes its content. I do not have a large amount of content for each section, but as a whole it makes one nice cohesive page for each material. I do use H tags to show the specific sections on the page, but I am wondering if it may be better to have one page dedicated to the specific material properties, one page dedicated to specific applications, and one page dedicated to available types. What are the communities thoughts on this? As a user of the website, I would rather have all of the information on a single, well organized page for each material. But what do SEO best practices have to say about this? My last thought would be to create a hybrid website (I don't know the proper term). Have a look at these examples from Time and Quartz. When you are viewing a article, the URL is unique to that page. However, when you scroll to the bottom of the article, you can keep on scrolling into the next article, with a new unique URL - all without clicking through to another page. I could see this technique being ideal for a good web experience while still allowing me to optimize my content for more specific topics/keywords. If I used this technique with the Canonical tag would I then get the best of both worlds? Let me know your thoughts! Thank you for the help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jaspercurry0 -
Can I 301 redirect old URLs to staging URLs (ex. staging.newdomain.com) for testing?
I will temporarily remove a few pages from my old website and redirect them to a new domain but in staging domain. Once the redirection is successful, I will remove the redirection rules in my .htaccess and get the removed pages back to live. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Why do websites use different URLS for mobile and desktop
Although Google and Bing have recommended that the same URL be used for serving desktop and mobile websites, portals like airbnb are using different URLS to serve mobile and web users. Does anyone know why this is being done even though it is not GOOD for SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | razasaeed0