A 301 redirect to a page with a rel canonical to a page with a 301 question...
-
MOZ registers thousands of DC and Duplicate titles on a Drupal site which has a little strange setup.
Example:
www.1234.com/en-us 301 redirects to www.realsite.com/en-us which has a rel canonical to www.1234.com which 301 redirects to www.realsite.com.
If you're still with me I thank you.
My question is since MOZ registers errors, if indeed the rel canonical isn't recognized due to a 301 redirect? -
I agree it's a strange setup and also suspected it would be ignored. I appreciate the answers and will see if there is a way to hardcode a way out of it.
-
It's really difficult to tell what Google will do in these situations, and it's generally a bad idea to chain redirects and caonicals, but I suspect the canonicals will be ignored. The bigger problem here is that the 301 is basically saying that "realsite.com" is canonical, but then the canonical is saying that "1234.com" is canonical. Even as a human, the logic doesn't make any sense, unless I'm missing something. You may see unpredictable results (and unpredictable is usually bad).
-
Hi Phillip,
Check out this great reference by Dr Pete: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
In a nutshell (if I can get my head around it) rel canonical is 'suggesting' to google which version of a page should be indexed for search purposes while 301 redirects are basically taking you to the canonical version of the page already and therefore is more final in regards both users and bots.
The set up you have (assuming that you want to consolidate 1234.com to realsite.com permanently) has a problem in that you are telling google that realsite.com/en-us has a canonical of 1234.com (which is just a suggestion, not a permanent redirect) and therefore yes the canonical as you say is not being reognised in the way you expect it to be because it is indeed just a suggestion, not a followed link if you see what I mean. I think 301 redirecting the realsite/en-us to realsite.com is the only thing that will be a permanent solution.
Hope I got that right, maybe someone else can chime in....
-
Hi Lynn thank you for your response.
Yes a horrible setup but has something to do with Drupal URL architecture.
In Moz it show's www.realsite.com/en-us and www.realsite.com as the culprits so it seems to ignore the rel cannonical from www.realsite.com/en-us to www.1234.comI might ask the Moz team if Googlebot treats this the same way.
Again thank you for your answer.
-
That is just nasty! Which domain is showing the duplicates? I assume the realsite.com and it is showing duplicates between the / and the /en-us versions? I cannot say if moz is registering the errors in the same way exactly as a search bot would register them, but you are asking for trouble with it.
Can you not simplify the chain? It seems to me that the cross domain canonical is pointless in this case. You have all 1234.com urls 301 to their realsite.com equivalents. OK. If needed canonical the realsite.com/en-us to realsite.com or probably better yet 301 redirect it also. It might need a bit of technical fiddling to get it all set up, but surely there must be a way!
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
-
Why doesn't Moz crawl whole pages of our website to report All On-Page issues?
Hi friends & mozzers, How can't Moz crawl whole pages of our website: https://www.4atvtires.com/ to report All Serious On-Page issues. We have more than 15000 product pages. And how could it be possible that Moz isn't able to crawl whole, just got crawl report upto 258 pages of our website, and also I can experience the same in Google webmaster ?? Please help to fix this issue as early as possible. Regards,
Moz Pro | | BigSlate
Rann0 -
Unable to crawl pages
Hi, I am trying to set up a campaign for our website - www.salvationarmy.org.au however, I can't seem to get a scan of more than three pages. I have tried the following: www.salvationarmy.org.au (only 2 pages) www.salvationarmy.org.au/home (only 1 page) salvationarmy.org.au (only 3 pages) There is a geo IP redirect on www.salvationarmy.org.au but the second domain listed above should resolve the full site. I'm a newbie to SEOmoz so any help would be appreciated! Thanks, Mel
Moz Pro | | KingPings0 -
Does the Crawl Diagnosis - Duplicate Page Content account for a canonical meta tags?
I see the same page listed 3 time (with different query params). But on each I have a meta tag pointing to the correct canonical url. By still seeing all three listed, does that mean there is an error with my meta tag?
Moz Pro | | Simantel0 -
Transfering Page Authority
Hi, I have recently change my url architecture with site redesign and was just doing some analysis of the old and new pages. I seem to be losing a little bit of Organic Search because of it. As an example this old diving page in open site explorer shows a Page Authority of 46 whilst the new diving page shows a Page Authority of 22. I have a 301 redirect going from the old page to the new, but that seems to be quite a drop in Page Authority. Is there anything else I can be doing to improve upon it? Thanks, Adam
Moz Pro | | NaescentAdam0 -
Crawl diagnostic Notices for rel Canonical increased
Hello, We just signed up for SEO Moz, and are reviewing the results of our second web crawl. Our Errors and Warnings summary have been reduced, but our Notices for Rel Canonical have skyrocketed from 300 to over 5,500. We are using a WP with the Headway theme and our pages already have the rel=canonical along wiht rel=author. Any ideas why this number would go up so much in one week? Thank you, Michael
Moz Pro | | MKaloud0 -
Competitive Domain Analysis Question
When looking at the Competitive Domain Analysis I noticed that I am the only one amongst my competitors that does not have a link from DMOZ. The problem is, I do have a link from them. When you search for my site on dmoz.org you can find my site and it has been that way for quite a while. Anyone know any possible reasons it may be doing this?
Moz Pro | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Domain vs Page
I see a lot of different metrics pointing to domain or page. What is the difference between these two definitions?
Moz Pro | | Gfrink0 -
Question about when new crawls start
Hi everyone, I'm currently using the trial of seomoz and I absolutely love what I'm seeing. However, I have 2 different websites (one has over 10,000 pages and one has about 40 pages). I've noticed that the smaller website is crawled every few days. However, the larger site hasn't been crawled in a few days. Although both campaigns state that the sites won't be crawled until next Monday, is there any way to get the crawl to start sooner on the large site? The reason that I've asked is that I've implemented some changes that will likely decrease the amount of pages that are crawled simply based upon the recommendations on this site. So, I'm excited to see the potential changes. Thanks, Brian
Moz Pro | | beeneeb0