Should you 301, 302, or rel=canonical private pages?
-
What should you do with private 'logged in' pages from a seo perspective? They're not visible to crawlers and shouldn't be indexed, so what is best practice? Believe it or not, we have found quite a few back links to private pages and want to get the ranking benefit from them without them being indexed.
Eg: http://twiends.com/settings (Only logged in user can see the page)
302 them: We can redirect users/crawlers temporarily, but I believe this is not ideal from a seo perspective? Do we lose the link juice to this page?
301 them: We can do a permanent redirect with a short cache time. We preserve most link juice now, but we probably mess up the users browser. Users trying to reach a private page while logged out may have issues reaching it after logged in.
**Serve another page with rel=canonical tag: **We could serve back the home page without changing the URL. We use a canonical tag to tell the crawlers that it's a duplicate of the home page. We keep most of the link juice, and the browser is unaffected. Yes, a user might share that different URL now, but its unlikely.
We've been doing 302's up until now, now we're testing the third option. How do others solve this problem? Is there a problem with it?
Any advice appreciated.
-
You should 302 redirect non-authenticated users to http://twiends.com/login.
This is a better user experience, and you avoid the potential authentication issues with the 301. It's also not really correct or useful to make it a 301 redirect: users aren't being 'permanently' redirected to the login page, and there's not much utility in forcing link juice to be passed from /settings to /login either.
So requests to /settings should either show that user's settings or 302 redirect to /login. Don't duplicate the home page content and rely on a canonical tag. Your domain (and domain authority) are still going to benefit, and I just don't think there's enough of a case to sculpt the flow of link juice in this way. As Andreas has pointed out, the link juice isn't the most important consideration here; it's better to focus on user experience. Your homepage's ability to rank for any given term is unlikely to be affected by the decision to 'rel=canonical' all private pages to the home page.
-
He said I should use the canonical as what it's made for - he said I shouldn't use it as a redirect - I asked if I should/could use a canonical as redirect and he said: it could happen that google starts to think about it: is it a canonical? should it be a 301? Something like that, and he said I should use redirect
Was a german Hangout in September/October.
He didn't say anything about link juice - I just thought it should be that way.
-
Hi Andreas, are you sure..? According to this article on Moz:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
"The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect"
Did John Mueller say that the tag does not pass link juice? Do you have a link to the hangout recording so that I can check it out..?
Thanks
-
A canonical is (guess it was John Mueller who said it) not give you any linkjuice.
He told me in a Webmaster Hangout to use Canonical only for that what it is made for (not for redirects in that hangout-case). Your idea isn't the perfect canonical example.I would simply redirect everybody (who is not logged in) to a login/sign page. That would be the best thing for the users (UX). You send them to the homepage, wich is not perfect for ux. I would ignore the linkjuice in that case.
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
-
Renamed a page and created a 301, page lost its rankings.
We changed a page name to fall under the root of our site from domain.com/page1/page301d/ to domain.com/page301d/ and after 2 weeks it still is not back to its #3 position. Now it is on the bottom of page 3. I cant figure out what im doing wrong here. The original .com/page1/ that this page fell under was removed totally and redirected to antoher page that was more relevant. I went ahead and re-enabled this page and its contnent, because the page was linking out to the page we 301d. This page we re-enabled had about 150 links poitning to it and therefore i was thinking that maybe the link juice from this page (or relevancy) via an internal link was helping it rank. This was updated about 6 days ago and the internal link is back Any other ideas why this might not be working. Ive checked all the 301s, content has not changed on the page. We have updated the strcuture for many pages. Instead of having the pages in question fall under anotehr page, they all fall under the root and its sub content is now only 2 levels deep , instead of being 3. hope that makese sense.
On-Page Optimization | | waqid0 -
Webs Pages not correct
First of all I am a beginner but that will show with this question. I have moved my website from Wix to Web.com. I had the dns I think that is correct re-direct my site to web.com. Since then some of the pages from wix still show up even though they are no long apart of my site. Secondly when I go to google and type in cestoday.com some of the pages gives me a 401 or 404 error code, and others do not link to the proper page on my website. They go to my web-site but not the correct page. What do I do. Thank you Dave
On-Page Optimization | | redsman944
cesyes@hotmail.com In reference to my last question about moz not being able to see my pages and giving me an "F" I thought you might find it interesting to know that that same page once moved got an A amazing.0 -
Is there any decent web browser that still displays the full page title at the top of the page?
I just updated to the latest version of Firefox on my Mac and saw that they now hide most of the page title in the browser tab, like Chrome and Safari. I like to be able to see the full page title at all times (for reasons I'm sure you all understand) and that's pretty much the only reason I stuck with Firefox all these years. Now I'm looking for an alternative – any suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | matt-145671 -
Area pages
As area pages are seen as trying to game google (see link below) is their a 'better way' to target multipe areas (100 odd)? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | webguru20140 -
Why a page with an On Page A grade has a less good rank than a page with a F grade?
Why a page with an On Page A grade is ranked 17 in Google when the home page with a F grade is ranked 9 ? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Amadeus_eBC0 -
Duplicate page titles
We have search results pages on our site. They share the same page title, there is no real differentiator between the result pages, other than page 1, page 2 etc. How do we de-dup the titles? just add page 1/2/3 etc to the end of them?
On-Page Optimization | | lilibooz0 -
On Page Optimization Reports
How is it determined which terms and associated urls are chosen when SEOmoz tracks your On-Page Report Card? I'm receiving a lot of F Grades for terms I'm not really interested in and a lot of terms I'd like to be tracked aren't. Is there a way I can manually choose which terms and pages I'd like to be shown?
On-Page Optimization | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Pages not cached
Sorry for all the questions. I have dozens of article pages that are not cached by google. How can I get them cached?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0