Technical question about site structure using a CMS, redirects, and canonical tag
-
I have a couple of sites using a particular CMS that creates all of the pages under a content folder, including the home page. So the url is www.example.com/content/default.asp. There is a default.asp in the root directory that redirects to the default page in the content folder using a response.redirect statement and it’s considered a 302 redirect. So all incoming urls, i.e. www.example.com and example.com and www.example.com/ will go to the default.asp which then redirects to www.example.com/ content/default.asp. How does this affect SEO? Should the redirect be a 301? And whether it’s a 301 or a 302, can we have a rel=canonical tag on the page that that is rel=www.example.com? Or does that create some sort of loop? I’ve inherited several sites that use this CMS and need to figure out the best way to handle it.
-
Thanks. It confirms what I was thinking. I have asked our developers if the page can be moved to the root, but am getting a lot of pushback. So if it can't be done, I will make the canonical page the content/default.asp.
-
I do find things get weird with Google when you're home page isn't at the root, and ASP seems to often do this.
Unfortunately, if you 301-redirect to the deeper level, you shouldn't canonical back up to the root - it's a mixed signal. I'm with Martin - if you can't change it, you should probably 301-redirect to "/content/default.asp" and then use that as the canonical version as well (internal links, inbound links where possible, etc.). It's not ideal, but it may be the least worst solution.
-
That's not a great mechanism for a CMS even before you consider SEO!
Do you understand ASP sufficiently to move the default.asp to the root directory and then apply the rel=canonical?
If the actual homepage is /content/default.asp then there are two things you should probably consider
1. Make the redirect from root to /content/default.asp a 301 as it is permanently at that address, not temporarily
2. Any links you get in need to point to /content/default.asp for max effect.(2) is really tough as it's messy for webmasters and doesn't do your website branding any good. So, to be honest I would be looking at moving that default page to root, if the choice were mine.
Open to other opinions.
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
-
Some questions about URL structure and multi country website
Gajanand angela dayHi,
Technical SEO | | Shahjahaaan
I have a question from SEO experts and web developers.
I want to setup a job website for 5 countries. for each country i will provide daily jobs listing on the basis of
1. jobs by categories - for example : accounting jobs. IT jobs, Sales jobs
2. jobs by city - for example : jobs in boston, jobs in chicago
3. jobs by companies for example : jobs in facebook, jobs in emirates case :
a company name " emirates " located in "boston" having vacancy of "accounting job " having position of full time this case job will be present in following categories . 1. accounting jobs in boston
2. jobs in boston
3. jobs in emirates and open any above option there will be filter box on left side showing
position i.e full time
salary i.e 1000-1500
location i.e boston,chicago Q.1
i want to know when user search on google these terms "accounting jobs in boston " or "jobs in boston" or "jobs in emirates" same job will display which url structure is recommended in for each search term? Q.2 how we can do on page SEO for these terms because jobs listing will be changing daily because of new jobs addition and content is changing not Q.3 should i create website on separate domains for each country or same domain but with different folders in it
.co.uk or com/uk for UK and .ae OR .com/uae for UAE Note : i will also attach blog on it and each blog will focus on specific country knowledge for example for USA , how to find jobs in new york and for UAE how to find jobs in Dubai etc . Thanks in Advance0 -
Can you use a seperate url for a interior product page on a site?
I have a friend that has a health insurance agency site. He wants to add a new page, for child health care insurance to his existing site. But the issue is, he brought a new URL; insurancemykidnow.com and he want's to use it for the new page. Now, I'm not sure I'm right on this, but I don't think that can be done? I'm I wrong? = Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Coppell0 -
H1 Tags the same as Title Tags and other meta questions
I run an ecom store that has about 800 live products. When everything got set up, no one set up the title tags correctly. So I am going through to update them in bulk. What I was going to do was to take the product name (which serves as the H1 tag), use that with a postfix | CompanyName. If length is an issue I trim it down. But the question is, will having essentially duplicate information in here be an issue? Also, when someone was setting up meta descriptions, they often used basically the product name or a half sentence. Would it be better to remove the descriptions and allow google to decide? I even had some that were literally just the brand name of the product, which I already removed.
Technical SEO | | ShockoeCommerce0 -
Site Migration between CMS's
Hi There, I have a technical question about migrating CMS's but not servers. My client has site A on Joomla install, He want's ot migrate to Wordpress and we will call this site B. As he has a lot of old content on site A he doesn't want to lose, he has put site B (wordpress install) on a subdirectory site.com/siteb (for example). and will use a htaccess to forward the root domain to this wordpress site. Therefore anyone going to www.site.com will see the new wordpress site and the old content and joomla install will sit on the root of the server. Will Google have an issue with this? Will it even find the old content? what are the issues for the new site and new content? Look forward getting your guys input
Technical SEO | | nezona1 -
Canonical Expert question!
Hello, I am looking for some help here with an estate agent property web site. I recently finished the MoZ crawling report and noticed that MoZ sees some pages as duplicate, mainly from pages which list properties as page 1,2,3 etc. Here is an example: http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=2
Technical SEO | | artdivision
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=3 etc etc Now I know that the best practise says I should set a canonical url to this page:
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=all but here is where my problem is. http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 contains good written content (around 750 words) before the listed properties are displayed while the "page=all" page do not have that content, only the properties listed. Also http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 is similar with the originally designed landing page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses I would like yoru advise as to what is the best way to can url this and sort the problem. My original thoughts were to can=url to this page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses instead of the "page=all" version but your opinion will be highly appreciated.0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Can the Breadcrumb Trail be used as the H1 tag?
We hace recently discovered that the x-cart sites we have dont have H1 tags. Can the breadcrumb trail on the category and sub category pages be used as the H1 tag?
Technical SEO | | heathshowman0 -
Does Bing support cross-domain canonical tags?
We have heard Bing takes canonical tags as hints, but do they support cross-domain canonical tags? I don't think this has ever been discussed? Does anyone have an answer or insight? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0