Is it better to use XXX.com or XXX.com/index.html as canonical page
-
Is it better to use 301 redirects or canonical page? I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc.
-
Glad you got it sorted out. If you're 301-redirecting a lot of domains, I'd suggest doing it gradually or maybe holding off on the lowest-quality domains. Google can see a massive set of redirects as a bit of a red flag (too many people have bought up cheap domains and 301-redirected to consolidate the link equity). If the domains are really all closely related or if you're only talking about a handful (<5) then it's probably not a big issue.
-
I think things may be sorted out, but I am not sure. I actually put in 301-redirects from a bunch of domains that I own to this new domain, the content of which will eventually replace my main domain. But, I need to get the domain properly set up and optimized before I move it to my primary domain to replace the ancient web site. At that time, I will also redirect this site to the new, old site.
I used to have Google ad-words tied to some of the domains that I 301-redirected to the new web site that I am building. Those were just a waste of money, however, so I put them on hold. I also had a lot of problems with semel and buttons for web bouncing off those pages that I re-directed. I put in .htaccess commands to stop those spam sites and that seems to work.
-
Google seems to be indexing 30-ish pages, but when I look at the cached home-page, I'm actually seeing the home-page of http://rfprototype.com/. Did you recently change domains or 301-redirect the old site? The cache data is around Christmas (after the original question was posted), so I think we're missing part of the puzzle here.
-
So, I think I may have had things wrong. For one thing, it seems like moz and Google are only indexing 2 pages, while the site index shows something like 80 pages. (I suspect an image is a page, and there are a lot of images. But, there are about 10 or 12 distinct pages at the moment. Also, Google and moz do not seem to show the correct key words in any sense like they should, leading me to think that they were just spidering 2 pages. I don't know why. I added the following to my index.html header:
and
I assume I put them in the correct place. I also believe I don't need canonical pages anywhere else.
Should these changes to my index.html make the proper changes?
-
Yeah, I'd have to concur - all the evidence and case studies I've seen suggest that rel=canonical almost always passes authority (link equity). There are exceptions, but honestly, there are exceptions with 301s, too.
I think the biggest difference, practically, is the impact on human visitors. 301-redirects take people to a new page, whereas canonical tags don't.
-
In terms of rel=canonical that will pass value the same as a 301 redirect - for evidence have a look here:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
"Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement."
See DR Pete's response in this Moz Q&A:
http://moz.com/community/q/do-canonical-tags-pass-all-of-the-link-juice-onto-the-url-they-point-to
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?rd=1
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical
Matts Cutts stated there is not a whole lot of difference between the 301 and the canonical - they will both lose "just a tiny little amount bit, not very much at all" of credit from the referring page.
-
Ok, this is how I look at the situation.
So you have two URLs and the question is either to redirect301 or use canonical? In my opinion 301 is a better solution and this is because it will not only redirect people to the preferred version but the link value as well.
Whereas, with canonicals only search engines will know what is the preferred page but it will not transfer the link value which can help you with organic rankings.
Hope this helps!
-
You would put the canonical link in the index file and I would point that at the xxx.com version rather than the xxx.com/index.html version as people visiting your sites homepage are going to enter the domain and not the specific page so xxx.com rather than xxx.com/index.html.
There are some great articles on Moz explaining all this which I would suggest that you read -
http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
Dr Pete also did this post answering common questions on rel=canonical.
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
In terms of 301 redirects and canonicalization both pass the same amount of authority gained by different pages. If you are trying to keep it as clean as possible you need to be careful you don't create an issue redirecting your index file to your domain - here is an old post explaining how moz solved this 301 redirect on an Apache server
http://moz.com/blog/apache-redirect-an-index-file-to-your-domain-without-looping
I personally find that if all your links on your site reference your preferred(canonical) URL for the homepage so in this case xxx.com and you redirect the www version to this or vice versa depending on your preference then you add a canonical in the index.html file pointing at xxx.com in this case unless you prefer to do it the other way round with www.xxx.com for both you will be fine.
Hope this helps
-
I forgot. Of course, there is no xxx.com page, per se. It is actually xxx.com/index.html so if you needed to put the canonical reference on xxx.com, how would you do it?
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
-
Page Indexing without content
Hello. I have a problem of page indexing without content. I have website in 3 different languages and 2 of the pages are indexing just fine, but one language page (the most important one) is indexing without content. When searching using site: page comes up, but when searching unique keywords for which I should rank 100% nothing comes up. This page was indexing just fine and the problem arose couple of days ago after google update finished. Looking further, the problem is language related and every page in the given language that is newly indexed has this problem, while pages that were last crawled around one week ago are just fine. Has anyone ran into this type of problem?
Technical SEO | | AtuliSulava1 -
Help Center/Knowledgebase effects on SEO: Is it worth my time fixing technical issues on no-indexed subdomain pages?
We're a SaaS company and have a pretty extensive help center resource on a subdomain (help.domain.com). This has been set up and managed over a few years by someone with no knowledge of SEO, meaning technical things like 404 links, bad redirects and http/https mixes have not been paid attention to. Every page on this subdomain is set to NOT be indexed in search engines, but we do sometimes link to help pages from indexable posts on the main domain. After spending time fixing problems on our main website, our site audits now flag almost solely errors and issues on these non-indexable help center pages every week. So my question is: is it worth my time fixing technical issues on a help center subdomain that has all its pages non-indexable in search engines? I don't manage this section of the site, and so getting fixes done is a laborious process that requires going through someone else - something I'd rather only do if necessary.
Technical SEO | | mglover19880 -
Rel=canonical or 301 to pass on page authority/juice
I have a large body of product support documentation and there are similar pages for each of versions of the product, with minor changes as the product changes. The two oldest versions of this documentation get the best ranking and are powering Google snippets--however, this content is out of date. The team responsible for the support documentation wants current pages to rank higher. I suggested 301 redirects but they want to maintain the old page content for clients still using the older version of the product. Is there a way to move a page's power to a more updated version of the page, but without wiping out the old content? Considering recommending canonical tags, but I'm not sure this will get me all the way there either as there are some differences between pages, especially as the product has changed over time. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | rachelholdgrafer0 -
Google indexes page elements
Hello We face this problem that Google indexes page elements from WordPress as single pages. How can we prevent these elements from being indexed separately and being displayed in the search results? For example this project: www.rovana.be When scrolling down the search results, there are a lot of elements that are indexed separately. When clicking on the link, this is wat we see (see attachements) Does anyone have experience with this way of indexing and how can we solve this problem? Thanks! LlAWG4w.png C7XDDYS.png gVroomx.png
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Delete indexed spam pages
Hi everyone, I'm hoping someone had this same situation, or may know of a solution. One of our sites was recently pharmahacked 😞 We found an entire pharmaceutical site in one of the folder of our site. We were able to delete it, but now Google is showing us on not found error for those pages we deleted. First, I guess the question is will this harm us? If so, anyway we can fix this? Obliviously we don't want to do a 303 redirect for spam pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Bridge_Education_Group0 -
Duplicate Page Content / Rel Canonical
Hi, The diagnostics shows me that I have 590 Duplicate Page Content , but when it shows the Rel Canonical I have over 1000, so dose that mean I have no Duplicate Page Content problem? Please help.
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Are building a page using HTML 5 better for seo?
Very general question really, but does anyone know whether Google sees html5 pages as being superior in any way to xhtml or html 4.x pages?
Technical SEO | | jimpannell0