Canonical tags required when redirecting?
-
Hello,
My client bought a new domain and he wants it to be the main domain of his company. His current domain though has been online for 10 years and ranks pretty well on a few keywords. I feel it is necessary to redirect the old domain to the new one to take advantage of its ranking and avoid any broken links.
The sites are exactly the same. Same sections and same content. Is it necessary to place canonical tags on one of the sites to avoid duplicate content/sites?
Any thoughts?
Thanks
-
There are number of other signals you can send the search engines to try to speed up indexing of the new site, Eblan.
- once new site is live, resubmit xml sitemap to both Google And Bing Webmaster Tools
- use Fetch as Googlebot and Fetch as Bingbot on each Webmaster Tools to crawl and submit the most important pages from each of the most important sections of the site
- earn some new links to the pages of the new site (social media is especially useful for this - remember to update address in all SM profiles)
- request that high-value links pointing to old site are updated to new site (this can take some outreach to other webmasters - start this process well before the new site is to go live).
Hope that helps?
Paul
P.S. Here's an extensive SEOMoz post on the steps to implement and monitor a domain migration. And here's a great migration checklist infographic. You're going to want to get as much of this right as possible, as there can be considerable risk when doing this kind of major change
-
Hey Paul,
Thanks a lot for the info, to be honest I didn't even consider that. saved my life there.
And I hope Google doesn't take long to index the new domain.
Cheers!
-
Welcome, Eblan. Also, don't forget to use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools as an additional signal to Google for the domain change.
Paul
-
Thanks a lot Paul and Mike!
Sorry for the late response.
Yes, the new domain is all about rebranding. Also, their old domain was too long.
-
If you use 301 (permanent) redirects, there's no need for canonicals on the old pages because as far as the search engines are concerned, you're telling them the old pages no longer even exist. In fact, done properly, you can actually remove the old site altogether after a month or 6 weeks of the redirects being in place. (You point the old domain to the new site and place the redirects in the new site's .htaccess file)
This kind of move can be a big deal for a site that's been around for 10 years. Hopefully there's a compelling reason for wanting to change the domain name? Business rebranding, for example?
Paul
-
If you're 301 redirecting everything to proper, relevant alternative pages on the other site then there's no reason to canonicalize the page.
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
-
Redirect Juice?
Hello all! I have a partner site that is linking their product page (step 1) to our product page (step 2) and then we instantly forward them to our shopping cart page (step 3) with that product added. Will my product page (step 2) get the SEO juice from our partners link (step 1) even though we instantly forward to our shopping cart page (step 3)? Curious about ways to technically do this correctly. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamesmcd030 -
Is Canonical Tags a Good Option With 2 Similar Sites?
I have an existing ecommerce site, on a Yahoo platform. I have recently started a different site on the Magento platform with substantially/almost entirely the same products and categories. For various reasons, I won't be ready to do a 301 redirect to the new domain for about another 8 months. I have 4 questions: Is it a good idea to use canonical tags in the meantime? Is there a way to know if the is cannibalization between the sites? They rank for different keywords. Will I lose all traffic and rankings for the Yahoo site if I go the canonical route? If I remove the canonical tags at a later point, will the ranking and traffic of the Yahoo site come back? Thanks in advance for your advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_Hatanian0 -
PushState for redirects
Is it possible to use PushState for redirects from one site to another?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rgamedia_seo0 -
Putting Dates In Title Tag
Hi, I have a site were I write previews for sports match ups. I notice when I don't put the date in the title I rank much better for specific keywords. I also noticed that most people don't really put in the date when they do the search anyways, especially since google does a good job of showing the most recent pages anyways. The only reason I continue to put the date is because of this whole idea of not having page titles that are duplicate. So many of our games will be Team A vs Team B Preview, and Im worried that the term "preview" will become so repetitive that google may not like it. Any tips or ideas on how to approach this issue best? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz1 -
Redirects in .htaccess file
I am using yoast seo plugin for wordpress. I have done several link changes and placed approximately 80-100 301 redirect into .htaccsses file. Is this good practice? Do they have to be there forever? Is it not slowing down site? Or should this be done in different way? Thank you very much Iris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
Canonical tags and product descriptions
I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions. A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions. It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag. I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters. Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet. So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions. I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i'). Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group. Does this seem a sensible thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Canonical Tag Uses Source Title and Meta Data?
When optimising a regional same language micro site within a sub folder of a .com it dawned on me that our use of the hreflang and canonical meta elements will render individual elements such as H1 and title obsolete. As a canonical tag takes the canonical source title and meta right? It would still have value in optimising localised headings though? Appreciate any thoughts, suggestions (o:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3wh0 -
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