Canonicalising To A 301?
-
Hi there,
We currently make use of a 301 rule to always return the trailing slash version of any URL on the site.
Recently, it seems that the canonical tag was implemented incorrectly. Here's an example:
http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes is redirected to
http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes/ (trailing slash)
However, our canonical tags, across the site, are going to the non-slash version, as follows:
I'm right in saying this really damaging? Also, if I instruct the Dev team to implement a site-wide fix by adding the trailing slash in all cases, can I expect any weird side affects on my current rankings/indexation?
If so, I can only imagine it being a short-term thing as Google re-aligns it's index of our site?
I treat canonical tags with plenty of caution.
Any insights appreciated.
Cheers,
P.
-
Thanks Good Doctor,
Cheers,
P
-
I agree with everything Dr. Peat said. Those are all extremely Likely reasons for your site showing a Forward / or not and strongly agree with Dr. Peat you should follow tip and match the correct rel="canonical regardless of anything. Even if you think the URL is An exact match one you have told Google you want to have rel="canonical Happy New Year! Tom
-
It's certainly a mixed signal. It's hard to predict what Google will do, and they may just ignore the canonical in that case, but I've seen enough problems that I wouldn't take chances with it. My gut feeling is that the 301 is probably overpowering the canonical (and your Google index is showing the trailing slash in most cases), but I'd fix the canonical. You could see some short-term bounce, but I think it's for the best long-term.
FYI, you've got a ton of title tag duplication within the "/women" pages - you might want to look at adding some uniqueness to the deeper pages. That's unrelated - just something I noticed.
-
Precisely,
After reading various sources, it seems that the fix's pro's would outweigh any possible short term fluctuations.
Besides, I'm sure Google is smart enough to treat trailing-vs-non-trailing-slash URLs without as much variation as, say, one with a different structure.
Wonder if encoding has plays a part? Hahaha. More questions... I do love SEO.
-
PS not all of your webpages shows no forward /
http://www.zando.co.za/Nike-Brazilia-Duffle-Bag-Purple-47577.html
-
Best practices states that you should put the URL is it shows in browser. So if there is a / the rel="canonical should have / hope that that helps
should be
all the best,
Tom
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
-
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 -
Htaccess code to 301 redirect a folder change
Hi, I need some help to redirect all my site as there was a folder change. eg, the old structure was www.mysite.com/stuff-1/bags.html and I need it to go to the same structure without the "-1" eg: /stuff/bags.html
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
The "bags.html" will be lots of different products, so this would be a wildcard? What would the htaccess code need to be? Thanks0 -
301 Re-direct as referral traffic
So we have this site set up in analytics as www.domain.com and then analytics is showing the referral traffic as coming from domain.com and I just wanted to make sure I'm right in the theory that Google is counting the 301 as a different site and showing what is otherwise direct traffic as traffic coming from domain.com. If that's wrong let me know. Otherwise I'll just go through with that theory since no one on any forums that I could find had an answer to it.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
301 redirectmatch
I think I'm starting to loss my mind. I have worked with regex before with very little problems how with my redirects nothing appears to be working. A little guidance is needed! The Low down I have a site with Joomla CMS backend. The site is undergoing and SEO overhaul I was simple hoping to use a 301 redirect o these old pages that are now a causing 404's The addresses /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=53_blank /shop/product.php?id_product=11 I have tried the following redirects but no avail RedirectMatch 301 ^/shop/product.php?id_product=11$ http://www.nomitang.com/index.php/en/vm_getaway_w this does not work at all if I remove the ?.....ending then I can simply redirect the product page but this is not what we need. Why does RedirectMatch not register anything after the "?"? I also tried this RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=53_blank [NC]
Technical SEO | | Stefan-Thorpe
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.nomitang.com/ [R=301,L] But this also didn't work. Please could someone tell me how to redirect these url's and how to deal with the extrension Thanks Stefan0 -
Multiple (different) domains and canonicalisation
Hello, We've had experience with canonical tags for various domains before, such as tidying up product categories etc... However, can anyone point me to any guidelines about different domains using canonicalisation. For example: If I had the following sites, all with identical content - exampledomain.com completelydifferentdomain.net anothertotallydifferentdomain.com With canonical tags pointing to the first one (exampledomain.com), could this be harmful? Is it better to 301 redirect the other sites? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sarbs0 -
301 redirect on wordpress.com
Hi, How/where do I input a 301 redirect for my http site within wordpress.com. I am already redirecting my wordpress url to myy new non wordpress domain Thanks Lisa
Technical SEO | | lisamarieCunn0 -
Is this a safe 301 redirect?
We are moving our site from one platform to another. Currently on our site we have two homepages. "www.homepage.com" and "www.homepage.com/Index" Both pages have some high quality links pointing in on them. The problem: We are going to be doing a 301 redirect from "www.homepage.com/Index" page to "www.homepage.com" as we are moving platforms at this time we weren't going to create a "www.homepage.com/Index" page all. This leaves this page as an empty URL. With this webpage disappearing all together will we lose traction as we are redirecting an empty URL? Or is it better to recreate this "www.homepage.com/Index" on our new platform redirect it and wait for google to deIndex this page for us? As well is there a tutorial for how to implement 301 redirects or is this something worth looking for a developer and pay someone to do?
Technical SEO | | HCGDiet0 -
A technical 301 Redirect Question
Alright, I'm taking a chance and stepping into the developer role here...something completely out of my comfort zone so bear with me. We have a pretty site built in PHP (www.dassant.com) and we are coming across some duplicate content issues. For example, these are supposed to be the same page: http://www.dassant.com/products.php and http://www.dassant.com/products So the SEO in me states the obvious: We need a 301 redirect stat! Unfortunately, our developer went MIA and I am having the hardest time getting a 301 implemented. After some research I found the code that I need to paste into the PHP (for this specific page): Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Technical SEO | | EssEEmily
Header( "Location: http://www.dassant.com/products" );
?> However, when I paste it in, upload and refresh the page, I get these error messages in the (multiple) browsers I use. (See attached) http://imgur.com/a/1lar5 With my limited knowledge I can't find these supposed other redirects so I'm stumped. Can anyone shed some light? Thank you in advance! 1lar50