Temporary Redirects on Magento
-
I've recently taken over a client who uses the Magento platform and there was definitely a duplicate issue with his homepage. It redirected www to non www, however the canonical tag was setup wrong and pointing to the www version.
When I looked at OSE for both versions the non www has only 7 linking domains and a page authority of 32. The www version has 24 linking domains and page authority of 39. As the domain is fairly new, I decided to redirect the non www to www and keep the canonical the same. (I changed the internal linking structure etc).
When I run both URLs through this tool: http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-... it's returning a whole bunch of 302, rather than 301 redirects. What's the deal with that? Is that a Magento setting that I can fix or something a little harder?
I'm not sure if it's proper etiquette to post the URL of a client, so if that would help and is OK, please let me know.
Thanks
-
Been looking for this for ages.
Thanks
-
Wouldn't call myself an expert by any stretch, however, I've have set up and still run a few Magento stores.
The reason I asked which version your site is running, is because I believe they rolled out the 301 option in version 1.4.2.0 (based on the release notes I checked). Definitely strange you don't see it when using version 1.5.1.0.
You can solve it instead, as you rightly point out, using a rewrite rule in .htaccess, like the second extra rule from the Creare article:-
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.co.uk [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,NC]
I don't usually find I need this, because Magento solves the www issue with that 301 dropdown menu option which is missing for you.
I don't generally need the first extra rule from that article, either:-
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
When I switch on Web Server Rewrites in the Magento backend, and correct the Magento root (if necessary) in .htaccess, as described in that article, the removal of index.php from URLs is usually solved. If you do still have the index.php problem, however, you could solve it in .htaccess too.
I'm definitely not an apache/mod_rewrite expert so I can't vouch for the syntax necessarily, however it certainly looks correct.
If I were you (or your client), I'd also want to get to the bottom of why I don't see that 301 option in Magento, as it could be symptomatic of an incomplete upgrade in the past. It could of course, be something else obvious which I'm missing - definitely worthy of further investigation though.
-
Hi Neil,
1.5.1.0.
Do you have much experience in rewriting htaccess files for Magento? I assume this article pretty much sums it up?
http://www.crearegroup-ecommerce.co.uk/blog/e-commerce-seo/htaccess-rewrites-for-magento-shops.php
Cheers
-
Hey Brad.. that is strange. I guess the next logical question would be which version of Magento is the site running?
-
Haha I only have two options (Yes or No):
| <label for="web_url_redirect_to_base">Redirect to Base URL if requested URL doesn't match it</label> | I.e. redirect from http://example.com/store/ to http://www.example.com/store/ |
-
You should have three options in that dropdown.. No, Yes (302 Found), and Yes (301 Moved Permanently). 301 should be the third option on the list.
-
Hi Neil,
Thanks for the superfast answer, appreciate it.
OK I switched that option from Yes to No. This fixed the temporary redirect problem. However, now both the www and non www versions are returning a 200 response (see http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/).
Is this an easy fix in Magento? I know in other systems such as Volusion we don't have access to htaccess. I'm guessing I can't do anything about this and I just have to worry about setting up the correct canonical?
Thanks
-
Hey Brad.. firstly, posting client URLs is fine as far as SEOmoz Q&A is concerned, however, it's entirely up to you in terms of client privacy.
Magento has a setting in the back-end for solving www/non-www canonicalisation (System > Configuration > Web > URL options). You'll see a setting for redirect type ("Auto-redirect to Base URL"), and obviously you'll want to ensure it's set to 301 rather than 302.
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
-
Redirection Problem
I have a site that has 2,50,000 pages and I want to redirect to another domain. Is it good practice for SEO and google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari0 -
Content From API - Remove or to Redirect ?
Hi Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaddyM556
I am working on a site at the moment,
Previous developer used a API to pull in HealthCare content (HSE) .
So the API basically generates landing pages within the site, and generates the content.
To date it has over 2k in pages being generated.
Some actually rank organically and some don't. New site being launch: So a new site is being launched & the "health advice" where this content used to live be not included in the new site. So this content will not have a place to be displayed. My Query: Would you allow the old content die off in the migration process & just become 404's
Or
Would you 301 redirect the all or only ranking pages to the homepage ? Other considerations, site will be moved to https:// so site will be submitted to search console & re-indexed by Google. Would love to hear if anyone had similar situation or suggestions.
Best Regards
Pat0 -
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Getting SEO Juice back after Redirect
Hi, On my website, many product pages were redirected over time to its product category, due to the product being unavailable. I understand with a 301 redirect, the final URL would have lost about 15% of the link juice. However - if after some time (e.g. 2 months, or 1 year) I remove the redirection - is the original page going to have any SEO juice, or did it already lose all of it? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Clarification around 301 redirects.
I’ve come across numerous blogs recently that suggest that SEOs should NOT do bulk re-directs to a category page. This has come as something of a surprise (doh!!) and I feel like I should already know this. It does seem like there is lots disagreement here so I thought that I’d ask what people’s opinions were to make sure that I get my thinking straight. I've read all the main Moz blog posts on this topic and, although really useful, they've left me none the wiser around a few specific questions. Here’s some more detail about the situation. We’re currently consolidating a lot of content into a main blog, which will be the focal point of new blogs posts that are created. This is different to the past, where we tended to create separate blogs for different products on separate domains. I’m currently considering how we move content across from one the older blogs to this new blog (which will soon sit on a subfolder of our main domain). I have three (!) questions: 1) Could you confirm that doing bulk re-directs a category page is bad? I already know that doing them all to the homepage is an error. 2) Should I re-direct the home page of the old blog on a separate domain to the relevant category page on the new site? The category page is related, but does not cover the EXACT topic. The category page covers our replacement product offering. It I shouldn't do this, where should I re-direct the old blog domain to? 3) I’ve recommended that we set up 301 redirects on a one-to-one basis, redirecting each piece of content to its new location on the old site. What about content that has been earmarked for removal and for which there is no obvious alternative? My previous recommendation has been to re-direct these pages to the most relevant category page on the new blog. Would it be better to let this 404 or, as an alternative, create a custom 404 for the users on the new blog highlighting the new content that we offer? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Htaccess redirect veriables
Hey, I'm trying to redirect all instances of "/archive_details.php?id=*" to "/public-affairs-job-archive.php". Is the below code correct? Redirect 301 /archive_details.php?id=* /public-affairs-job-archive.php Thanks, Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
Duplicate titles but redirecting anyway (without redirects set up!!!)
Google has done a crawl of my site and is flagging up duplicate titles on my wordpress site. This appears to be due to the face that some posts are tagged in more than one category. I have just gone to make sure that each post just has one category and add redirects and I've noticed that all the duplicate title issues google has notified me about appear to redirect anyway. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy and http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy have duplicate titles apparantly but the 1st url redirects to the 2nd one. I use the redirection plug in but have no redirection set up for that url so I'm a bit confused. And if they're redirecting anyway then why is google flagging up duplicate titles? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK1 -
Reducing pages with canonical & redirects
We have a site that has a ridiculous number of pages. Its a directory of service providers that is organized by city and sub-category of the vertical. Each provider is on the main city page, then when you click on a category, it will only show those folks who offer that subcategory of this service. example: colorado/denver - main city page colorado/denver/subcat1 - subcategory page There are 37 subcategories. So, 38 pages that essentially have the same content - minus a provider or two - for each city. There are approx 40K locations in our database. So rough math puts us at 1.5 million results pages, with 97% of those pages being duplicate content! This is clearly a problem. But many of these obscure pages do rank and get traffic. A fair amount when you aggregate all these pages together. We are about to go through a redesign and want to consolidate pages so we can reduce the dupe content, get crawl budget allocated to more meaningful pages, etc. Here's what I'm thinking we should do with this site, and I would love to have your input: Canonicalize Before the redesign use the canonical tag on all the sub-category pages and push all the value from those pages (colorado/denver/subcat1, /subcat2, /subcat3... etc) to the main city page (colorado/denver/subcat1) 301 Redirect On the new site (we're moving to a new CMS) we don't publish the duplicate sub-category pages and do 301 redirects from the sub-category URLs to the main city page urls. We'd still have the sub-categories (keywords) on-page and use some Javascript filtering to narrow results. We could cut to the chase and just do the redirects, but would like to use canonicalization as a proof of concept internally at my company that getting rid of these pages is a good thing, or at least wont have a negative impact on traffic. i.e. by the time we are ready to relaunch traffic and value has been transfered to the /state/city page Trying to create the right plan and build my argument. Any feedback you have will help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trentc0