I need to know more clearance on rel=canonical usage than 301 redirects ?
-
Hi all SEOmozs,
As we all know purposes of rel=canonical , I have a query to ask that If we don't have any possibility to use 301 redirects on a domain , can it be really right to use rel=canonical on an old domain to let search engine to treat those all pages should be not priority where the domain we are being promoted in the market to list up instead that. I found this interesting Matt Cutts video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJK5Uloy76g where he has told or cleared the point very nicely, yes we can use it if there is no possibility in your older domain or pages. So here i am asking the same to know more detailed clarity on this so that i can be more confidence on it.
I have been seeing issues in my domains where old one domain comes than new domain why with new domain contents, and can it be really very good to bring new domain with **rel=canonical without using 301 redirect :
Old : kanin.com (leaving) New : kangarokanin.com (promoting)Where i might have not used yet the rel=canonical in old domain, will be going to use it soon , after finishing this discussion.**
Regards,
Teginder Ravi -
The thumbs up Dr. Pete,
You definitely explain that much better than I could. And completely agree once the 301 in place there should be nothing else associated with it.
Teginder
I thought I would send this link with a screenshot from Google searching for staplers Google I noticed in your screenshots you are logged in to Google I just wanted you to know if you're constantly searching for staplers and your URL Google will modify the search to suit what it thinks is your needs. Hence I did a very unscientific incognito check allowing Google to give me a less biased search result. to make it more useful high logged into SEM Rush and searched staplers and received what you can find inside the CVS file for the top 10 organic results. So you know this is what came up In the photographs is different from what SEM Rush and Google are telling me.
https://blueprintmarketing.sharefile.com/d/scdb1ed7e9464929b
The very best of luck with your new website.
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
-
The thumbs up Dr. Pete,
You definitely explain that much better than I could. And completely agree once the 301 in place there should be nothing else associated with it.
Teginder
I thought I would send this link with a screenshot from Google searching for staplers Google I noticed in your screenshots you are logged in to Google I just wanted you to know if you're constantly searching for staplers and your URL Google will modify the search to suit what it thinks is your needs. Hence I did a very unscientific incognito check allowing Google to give me a less biased search result. to make it more useful high logged into SEM Rush and searched staplers and received what you can find inside the CVS file for the top 10 organic results. So you know this is what came up In the photographs is different from what SEM Rush and Google are telling me.
https://blueprintmarketing.sharefile.com/d/scdb1ed7e9464929b
The very best of luck with your new website.
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
-
Thanks Dr. Pete for lighting more on this comparing with 301 redirects & rel tags.
-
One thing that I almost always see overlooked in these discussion - 301 and canonical have totally different impacts on the visitors to your site. A 301 will take the visitor to the new site, whereas a canonical won't. If you're really trying to phase out the old domain, canonicals could be self-defeating, because people won't know the site has moved and they'll still bookmark, tweet, link to, etc. the old URLs.
Keep in mind, too, that cross-domain canonicals are at Google's discretion. While they often work, and can pass PageRank, they're sometimes ignored. The are cases where canonicals may be safer, such as if you suspect the old domain carries a penalty. For a full site move, though, I'd almost always go with 301s.
-
Hi Teginder, When you apply the 301 Redirect to the new webpage Google will actually no longer index it it will believe that it has just become a part of the pages just pointed at meaning you literally could set the rel tags but that's all you'd have to do you definitely do not need to worry about. I hope I was of help Sincerely , Thomas Zickell
-
I want to know one more thing that i am going to use and bring new domain pages with using rel=canonical tags where there is no possibility of 301 redirect use WITH , I just want to know that Will Google not to index the pages where i will use noindex and get to know that the same page has been letting to move new primary versions of the page to crawl and index them. Regards, Teginder Ravi
-
prior to changing domains you want to do exactly this
with rel=canonical without using 301 redirect :
Old : kanin.com (leaving) New : kangarokanin.com (promoting)** that will get Google on the same track but you really don't want take long before implementing the 301 redirect maybe 24 hours.**
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
-
How effective are 301 redirects in passing page rank?
I have a blog which is ranking well for certain terms, and would like to repurpose it to better explain these terms it is ranking for, including updating the url to the new term the blog will be about. The plan being to 301 redirect the old url to new. In the past, I've done this with other pages, and have actually lost much of the rankings that I had earned on the original URL. What is your take on this? Maybe repurpose blog, but maintain original URL just to be on the safe side? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question
Hi All, Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr: Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is. I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns. A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS. Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium. I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.) This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ogiovetti0 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
How similar do pages need to be to utilize the canonical tag
One of my pages is a help and questions page about completing a conversions and the other is the actual campaign landing page. They are both ranking for the same term. While the subject of both pages is similar the content is not. Is the rel canonical tag appropriate here?
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Switching forum software - 301 redirects?
Hi everyone I'm working on a successful Wordpress site that also has a forum attached. The forum currently uses YAF forum software, which requires Windows hosting. The site owner wants to switch to Linux hosting. This is not a problem for WP, but it does mean that we'll need to transfer the forum to Xenforo or something similar that runs on Linux. We're OK with the technical side of this, but we're worried about the SEO implications. The URL for every forum post (more than 50,000 of them) is going to change during this transfer. It seems completely impractical to 301 each of those, so should I just 301 the URLs that have inbound links? Also, what is google's algo going to think when we suddenly have ~50,000 404s? Many thanks in advance! J
Technical SEO | | van280 -
Can you do a 301 redirect without a hosting account?
Trying to retire domain1 and 301 it to domain2 - just don't want to get stuck having to pay the old hosting provider simply to serve a .htaccess file with the redirect rule.
Technical SEO | | TitanDigital0 -
On-Page Report Card & Rel Canonical
Hello, I ran one of our pages through the On-Page Report Card. Among the results we are getting a lower grade due to the following "critical factor" : Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Explanation If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL. Recommendation We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. This is for an e-commerce site, and the canonical links are inserted automatically by the cart software. The cart is also creating the canonical url as a relative link, not an absolute URL. In this particular case it's a self-referential link. I've read a ton on this and it seems that this should be okay (I also read that Bing might have an issue with this). Is this really an issue? If so, what is the best practice to pass this critical factor? Thanks, Paul
Technical SEO | | rwilson-seo0 -
Rel=Canonical being ignored?
Hi all, We have a toys website that has several categories. It's setup such that each product has a primary category amongst the categories within it can be found. For example... Addendum's primary url is http://www.brightminds.co.uk/childrens-toys/board-games/addendum.htm but it can also be found here http://www.brightminds.co.uk/learning-toys/maths-learning/addendum.htm. Hence, in the for that url it has a rel=canonical that points to the first url. For some reason though seomoz ignores this and reports duplicate page content. It doesn't seem to record the canonical tag either. Any ideas what's going on? Thanks, Josh.
Technical SEO | | joshgeake_gmail.com0