Canonical vs 301 - Web Development
-
So I'm having a conversation with the development team at my work and I'm a little tired today so I thought I would ask for other opinions. The currently the site duplicates it's full site by having a 200 show with or without a trailing slash. I have asked for a 301 redirect to with the trailing slash. They countered with having all the rel=canonical be the trailing slash, which I know is acceptable. My issue is that while a rel=canonical is acceptable, since my site has a very high level of competition and a very aggressive link building strategy, I believe that it may be beneficial to have the 301 redirect. BUT, I may be wrong. When we're talking hundreds of thousands of links, I would love to have them directly linked instead of possibly splitting them up between a duplicate page that has a correct canonical. I'm curious to what everyone thinks though....
-
+1 for Egol here. A canonical is just a request to Google - a 301 is a directive Google has to respect. I don't really understand why your technical team is making such a fuzz about it - enforcing the trailing slash (or not) is just 1/2 lines in your .htacess file. Check Stackoverflow
Dirk
-
Going straight to the root. There are two versions, with and without slash, because someone started using them. So the first thing that needs to be done is to decide which one is dominant today and go with it. Immediately thereafter, development team, bloggers, everyone is to be informed of the new form of your URL and be expected to use it. Clean them up, get them off of the site. It's time to stop being sloppy. People who don't go with the company's method need to be reminded.
You will find disagreements on if you should use 301 or if you should use rel=canonical.
The advantage of a 301 is that it takes control and forces the URL that you want to the browser and bot. In contrast rel=canonical is a "hint" to Google. We know for a fact that google changes their mind about how they handle things and they will ignore variants of URLs for an awful long time. This same problem exists with parameters. Google provides parameter controls in your Search Console, however, if you have experience with them you will know that they are highly unreliable and take a long time to be picked up and partially obeyed. So you can take control with 301 or use rel=canonical in combination with prayer.
I use 301s because I don't trust Google to do things my way and because once you start using 301s your problems will immediately be reduced in size because the versions of the URLs that you don't want to see will be permanently eliminated from the address window of the browser. I am also pretty luck that the staff here knows how the URLs on our websites are standardized.
-
When it comes to the trailing slash on website URLs, the proper way is to use a 301 Permanent Redirect. However, you can help minimize this problem by fixing all of the internal links on the site so that you always link internally to the version that you prefer.
-
In some cases, implementing a self-referring 301 redirect may cause an infinite loop in which your homepage would not be accessible at all, so I can understand your dev team's reluctance.
A canonical tag and a 301 redirect pass the same amount of link authority, so in this case, they serve the same purpose and provide the same benefit. I'd stick with the canonical tag and pick a different, more valuable battle to fight.
-
301 Redirects are primarily designed for more permanent complicated jobs.
- Expired content
- Multiple versions of homepage
- Change of site
Canonical tags are a better way of telling Google that a query or slash is serving the exact same page content and is just a variation of the URL. Neither if done correctly will have a negative effect on the SEO, however using the canonical tag is far easier and appropriate.
https://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use
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
-
301 vs Canonical - With A Side of Partial URL Rewrite and Google URL Parameters-OH MY
Hi Everyone, I am in the middle of an SEO contract with a site that is partially HTML pages and the rest are PHP and part of an ecommerce system for digital delivery of college classes. I am working with a web developer that has worked with this site for many years. In the php pages, there are also 6 different parameters that are currently filtered by Google URL parameters in the old Google Search Console. When I came on board, part of the site was https and the remainder was not. Our first project was to move completely to https and it went well. 301 redirects were already in place from a few legacy sites they owned so the developer expanded the 301 redirects to move everything to https. Among those legacy sites is an old site that we don't want visible, but it is extensively linked to the new site and some of our top keywords are branded keywords that originated with that site. Developer says old site can go away, but people searching for it are still prevalent in search. Biggest part of this project is now to rewrite the dynamic urls of the product pages and the entry pages to the class pages. We attempted to use 301 redirects to redirect to the new url and prevent the draining of link juice. In the end, according to the developer, it just isn't going to be possible without losing all the existing link juice. So its lose all the link juice at once (a scary thought) or try canonicals. I am told canonicals would work - and we can switch to that. My questions are the following: 1. Does anyone know of a way that might make the 301's work with the URL rewrite? 2. With canonicals and Google parameters, are we safe to delete the parameters after we have ensures everything has a canonical url (parameter pages included)? 3. If we continue forward with 301's and lose all the existing links, since this only half of the pages in the site (if you don't count the parameter pages) and there are only a few links per page if that, how much of an impact would it have on the site and how can I avoid that impact? 4. Canonicals seem to be recommended heavily these days, would the canonical urls be a better way to go than sticking with 301's. Thank you all in advance for helping! I sincerely appreciate any insight you might have. Sue (aka Trudy)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TStorm1 -
URLs with parameters + canonicals + meta robots
Hi Moz community! I'm posting a new question here as I couldn't find specific answer to the case I'm facing. Along with canonical tags, we are implementing meta robots on our pages (e-commerce website with thousands of pages). Most of the cases have been covered but I still have one unanswered case: our products are linked from list pages (mostly categories) but they almost always include a tracking parameter (ie /my-product.html?ref=xxx) products urls are secured with a canonical tag (referring only to the clean url /my-product.html) but what would be the best solution regarding the meta robots? For now we opted for a meta robot 'noindex, follow' for non canonical urls (so the ones unfortunately linked from our category/list pages), but I'm afraid that it could hurt our SEO (apparently no juice is given from URLs with a noindex robots), and even maybe prevent bots from crawling our website properly ... Would it be best to have no meta robots at all on these product urls with parameters? (we obviously can't have 'index, follow' when the canonical ref points to another url!). Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessicaZylberberg0 -
Using Canonical Attribute
Hi All, I am hoping you can help me? We have recently migrated to the Umbraco CMS and now have duplicate versions of the same page showing on different URLs. My understanding is that this is one of the major reasons for the rel=canonical tag. So am I right in saying that if I add the following to the page that I want to rank then this will work? I'm just a little worried as I have read some horror stories of people implementing this attribute incorrectly and getting into trouble. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Explaining 301 redirects instead of 302
I am trying to explain in layman's terms to a client why using 302 for their redirects (which they have done themselves) is not right. There view is they do not seem to listen or believe what is being said to them and do not want to do permanent damage to the old domain so are using 302 redirects. I have explained over and over 301 is needed but I do not seem to be good at communicating this. Can someone give me a good example or description I can use to get my point across?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Where to point Rel = Canonical?
I have a client who is using the rel=canonical tag across their e-commerce site. Here is an example of how it is set up. URLs 1. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.do?nType=22. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.doThe canonical tag points to the second URL. Both pages are indexed by Google.The first page has a higher page authority (most of the internal site links go to the first URL) than the second one. Should the page with the highest authority be the one that the canonical tag points to? Is there a better way to handle these situations? Does any authority get passed through the tag?Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Canonical issue with my Home Page
Hi, My site has several canonical issues that should be fixed. http://www.crosscountryallied.com For my Home Page, more links are pointing at www.crosscountryallied.com/ (887) than http:// http://www.crosscountryallied.com/ctAlliedWebSite (27). It is recommended that I implement a 301 redirect to recapture a significant amount of link value. The following lists show the most common canonicalization errors that can be produced when using default settings on my web server: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6 (IIS): http://www.crosscountryallied.com/ http://www.crosscountryallied.com/default.jsp (or .jsp depending on the version) http://crosscountryallied.com/ http://crosscountryallied.com/default.jsp or any combination with different capitalization. Each of these URLs spreads out the value of backlinks to our homepage. Should I just redirect them to: http://www.crosscountryallied.com and add a canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Web fonts & SEO
Hi everyone ! My question is regarding web fonts. We are currently working on a new design for our website and we're thinking about using web fonts instead of images containing the fonts we'd like to have. I'd like to know if web fonts can affect SEO as they need to be downloaded on the visitor's computers and consequently can slow down the load time of our web pages. If anyone has used web fonts in the past, do you have some specific tips to share ? Thank you in advance for your answers! Jeremie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxxum0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0