Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
-
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget).
A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url.
I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site.
We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
-
I know I promised you a crawl and I apologize for the delay I've been so busy lately. But here is something without your domain name on it that gives you an idea of what's going on I will private message you the rest of the information.
when I give you the report it will be in PDF format in addition to all five link you can click on anything with a green arrow or literally pretty much anything on the report to see more.
the amount of redirects you have are to say the least extremely high.
don't worry I have not put your domain in anything that is public.
Again I'm sorry for the delay,
Thomas
-
I have sent you a PM with information that I think you will find valuable. I don't know if you are allowed to continue to send over 1 or 2 PM's a day so feel free to email me at the email address I gave you or tom@tomzickell.com
This Is Definitely Affecting Your Crawl Budget And Having Looked at Your Site I Can Tell You Your Parameters Are a Huge Issue As Well. I Will Have Information for You in A Few Hours.
I will have your crawl finished in a few hours takes that long to actually do it but I gave you enterprise Ahrefs report where you can clearly see what's happening with the 301's is not good.
we need to figure out how many powerful inbound links you have pointing at these product pages if they are receiving two links because they have One and and the Other That Is A Problem. But I Am Assuming That Most of Them Are Not Going to Have This Issue.
You Also Have Two Sitemaps That Is a Negative Big Time.
Here Is a Photograph of That.
Talk to You Soon,
Thomas
-
To respond, I don't think it was an EMD or PMD (partial matching domain) issue as the domain is not relative to any keywords, industry, etc.
If the 301s are removed from these uppercase urls and sites link to them, would the canonical do enough to inform the crawlers to pick up the lowercase version where the canonical tag points to?
Would this cause link juice to be split between the uppercase urls and lowercase urls, or would the canonical take care of that? Note: there are plenty of links going to the uppercase urls because they were in existence for several years.
Thanks for the other suggestions.
-
Your suspicion seem to be warranted since Moz reports that for the July 2013 Panda Update: "The implication was that this was algorithmic and may have "softened" some previous Panda penalties". But on the other hand they state there were ranking fluctuations weeks prior to that, which they called "massive".
So what happened the weeks prior? This article by Moz's own Dr. Peter J Meyers provides a glue but nothing substantial: http://moz.com/blog/googles-multi-week-algorithm-update — it suggests that you may have been of the PMD's (partial match domains) or EMD's (exact match domains) that did not recover from that update. Curiously he also mentions the possibility that these might have been directly targeted.
Possibilities:
- You were directly targeted by Google. In which case your mission is to convince Google that you are now a good citizen. Better internal linking is a stronger sign of becoming non-spammy than going on an external link campaign.
- You were caught in a wider net of EMD's and PMD's that Google calculated to be too spammy and got a temporarily hammered. But adding the 301-s then took away your chance to recover via good internal linking that otherwise may have happened naturally ("blue widget" suggests you may run an e-commerce site). These two have identical results.
What to do:
- Remove 301, keep the canonical URL-s. As Thomas suggested.
- Add or renew internal links thoughtfully (couple of in-context links and related products, top sellers per page) and overview your breadcrumbs (if not already there).
- Add semantic SEO product (or whatever is relevant to you) mark-up, more unique images — everything you consider appropriate to signal to Google that you are not "spammy" anymore.
Just remember, you may no longer rely on your domain name to rank.
-
Hi,
simply by using a canonical tag in the beginning you would have not had to 301 redirect all of your links. Your internal linking structure can become a real issue if you have a lot of 301s creating redirect chains. There are so many variables in this that I honestly want to know more and why you made this change because you said this was before the rollout of Panda so were you doing anything that you thought would be bad?
-
Having a canonical tag with capital letters in the URL
-
as well as the canonical tag tells Google this is not duplicate content this is one URL.
or
I would be happy to do a brief audit on your website and give you the information using deep crawl this would allow me to give you a much more educated answer as to what you can do to fix this issue. However 301 redirecting that many links is not good when you can use a canonical tag. Simply send me a private message if you're uncomfortable posting the URL in the form.
Obviously anyone building a new website do not use capital letters in your URLs. However there are so many variations that the canonical tag tells Google this is the right URL rather it has capital letters in it or not.
Yes it is true that if you're using a Linux server especially having capital letters in your URLs is not preferred when building a site. However for you too 301 redirect all of your URLs or 50% because they are capitalized is way too much.
The canonical tag would have sufficed take care of the issue in an ideal situation obviously you would not create any links that have capital letters in them at all.
Would have been the ideal way of keeping your URLs simply because they have capitals in them does not make them terrible if Google knows which one is supposed to be the correct one.
http://example.com/Blue-Widget
Verse
301 to http://example.com/blue-widget
When Google crawls a website it is going to want the canonical so if you're old links had been written as
I don't know enough about the situation prior however when you think about it how many times can Google pick a different URL if it's in your's XML site map as well as your HTML site map?
the same thing occurs with
Google considers you must choose the correct URL and stick with it "Awesome links don't change".
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- Would fix this
in this case you can use it 301 redirect but you see the variances in all sorts of links this is corrected by picking the one you want and staying with it. If it's the original link I suggest you stick with that.
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development#4e
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
I hope this was of help to you,
Thomas
PS an example of what I was speaking about is right here. The domain name http://www.ras-tech.com CDN is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
I just had a CDN url created it the reason that this is relevant is the CDN has the option to put a canonical tag pointing to the origin server which is www.ras-tech.com but the URL for the CDN currently is http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
Go to the waterfall section and you can see that it took this tool to ras-tech.com
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/kNiPW/http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/
you can like at the site code and tell there is no CDN routed/ redirected through the site so this URL will take you to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/ this URL http://www.ras-tech.com unless I told it to go to another one using just the canonical.
try going to http://rastech.quizick.netdna-cdn.com/ and I guarantee it takes you to the origin.
-
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Is it possible that Google would disregard canonical tag?
Hi all, I was wondering if it is possible for Google to diregard the canonical tag, if for example they decide it is wrongly put based on behavioural data. On the Natviscript Blog's individual blog posts there is a canonical tag for the www.nativescript.org/blog/details (printscreen - http://prntscr.com/e8kz5k). In my opinion it should not be there, and I've put request to our Engineering team for removal some time ago. Interestingly, all blog posts are indexed and got decent amount of organic traffic despite the tag. What do you think? Could it be that Google would disregard the tag based on usage data from let's say GA? Thanks, Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lgrozeva0 -
Redirect 301 still works?
Hi, yesterday a friend said that 301 redirects does not transfer your page rank or domain autorithy anymore. I could'nt find anything in internet saying it, but I decided to ask you guys, since I think you are very reliable. so, 301 redirects wroks for transfer page rank, and i can create better domains and transfer everything, or this strategy is gone forever now?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chablau0 -
Is there a way to rel = canonical only part of a page?
Hi guys: I'm doing SEO for a boat accessories store, and for instance they have marine AC systems, many of them, and while the part number, number of BTUs, voltage, and accessories change on some models, the description stays exactly the same across the board on many of them...people often search on Google by model number, and I worry that if I put rel = canonical, then the result for that specific model they're looking for won't come up, just the one that everything is being redirected to. (and people do this much more than entering a site nowadays and searching by product model, it's easier). Excuse my ignorance on this stuff, I'm good with link building and content creation, but the behind-the-scenes aspects... not so much: Can I "rel=canonical" only part of the page of the repeat models (the long description)? so people can still search by model number, and reach the model they are looking for? Am I misunderstanding something here about rel=canonical (Interesting thing, I rank very high for these pages with tons of repeat descriptions, number one in many places... but wonder if google attributes a sort of "across the site" penalty for the repeated content... but wouldn't ranking number 1 for these pages mean nothing's wrong?. Thanks)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidCiti1 -
Persistent listings or 301 redirects better for SEO?
Imagine these 2 scenarios for an ecommerce listing. 1. A listing that only closes once stock runs out 2. A listing that relists every 7 days assuming stock has run out and doing a 301 redirect to the latest version of that listing (imagine it relists several times) You might ask why on earth we would have the 2nd scenario, but we are an auction site where some listings can't be bid on. In other words those Buy Now only listings are also part of the auction model - they close after 7 days. For me it is a no-brainer that scenario 1 is better for SEO, and I have my ideas on why this is better for SEO than the second scenario such as age, SERP CTR, link equity not being diluted by 301 redirects not changing every 7 days when the listing relists multiple times etc. I was wondering if someone could articulate better than I possibly could why scenario 1 is better for SEO, and why scenario 1 would rank better in the SERPS....would it? Many thanks! Cheers, Simon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sichristie0 -
How to redirect an url in .htaccess when "redirect 301" doesnt work
I have an odd page url, generated by a link from an external website, it has: %5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb ,after a .jpg image url, and I can't get it redirect using the redirect 301 in .htaccess to the properly image url as I use to do with the rest of not found urls eg: /15985.jpg%5Cu0026size=27.4KB%5Cu0026p=dell%20printers%20uk%5Cu0026oid=333302b6be58eaa914fbc7de45b23926%5Cu0026ni=21%5Cu0026no=24%5Cu0026tab=organic%5Cu0026sigi=11p3eqh65%5Cu0026tt=Dell%205210n%20A4%20Mono%20Laser%20Printer%20from%20Printer%20Experts%5Cu0026u=fb to just: /15985.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Status0 -
301 redirect on Windows IIS. HELP!
Hi My six-year-old domain has always existed in four forms: http://www**.**mydomain.com/index.html http://mydomain.com/index.html http://mydomain.com/ http://www.mydomain.com My webmaster claims it’s “impossible” to do a 301 redirect from the first three to the fourth. I need simple instructions to guide him. The site’s hosted on Windows running IIS Here’s his rationale: These are all the same page, so they can’t redirect to themselves. Index.html is the default page that loads automatically if you don’t specify a page. If I put a redirect into index.html it would just run an infinite redirect loop. As you can see from the IIS set up, both www.mydomain and mydomain.com point to the same location ( VIEW IMAGE HERE ) _Both of these use index.html as the default document ( VIEW IMAGE 2 HERE ) _
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Canonical URL Tag Usage
Hi there, I have a .co.uk website and a .ie website, which have the exact same content on both, should I put a canonical tag on both websites, on every page? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780