Correct use of Canonical link vs 301 redirect
-
Hi All,
Seeking yet more advice.
SEOMOZ tools have told me I have duplicate content on one of my sites and I am keen to clean this up. I am not to familiar with the following so thought I would ask.
The duplicate content is shown on :
Obviously I only see index.html when I check the code so what is the best method of resolving the duplicate content, Canonical or 301?
Can you give me an example
Thanks all
-
Thanks guys, exactly what I was looking for
-
Wayne,
A 301 is always preferred over a canonical when given the choice. You would use a canonical if you did not have access to your web server and did not have a better option.
The method of redirect depends on the hardware and software of your server. The most common shared servers use Apache and cPanel where there is a Redirect tool which allows you to perform this redirect. The Redirect tool writes the htaccess code for you.
You are also welcome to use the code Sean shared but if you have not modified your file before please understand any mistake can make your site inaccessible. Always back up the current file, make the change, and thoroughly test it.
-
Use a 301 Redirect with .htaccess. Use the following code in your 'htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
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
-
Subdir vs Subdomain vs ccTLD
Hello Community, I'm running a .com website with India targetted audience on Webmastertools from 2 years. Now I want to start a separate zone for US. .us domain is not available for my domain right now. So what is your suggestion for best results: 1. domain/us (Subdirectory) 2. us.domain (Subdomain) 3. new domain (separate website) I think Subdomain can work great if I will pass place a header link sitewide. Or that can reduce authority as mentioned on few blogs? Let me know your thoughts
On-Page Optimization | | sah900 -
When trying to sculpt an internal link structure, is there any point in placing text links to top level pages that are already in the main menu?
Does Google recognise a link in the content if there is already a link in the menu? My understanding is that Google only counts the first link it finds.
On-Page Optimization | | bittristo0 -
301 redirects, efficiency and dynamic URLs
Hi, I have 2 301 redirect questions. Question 1: I have am working with a designer on the redesign of a website that currently has over 5,000 indexed pages. The majority of these are dynamic URLs from the Stone Locator database. (see below) http://www.domain.com/storelocator.php?zipcode=91784&page=12 How can I efficiently deal with these pages from an SEO perspective when developing the new site? Is there a way to do a bulk 301 redirect to a store locator page, for instance? Question 2: If a rel=canonical tag has been established on a page (www....), is it necessary to add 301 redirects to all of the other versions on: the home page (domain.com , domain.com/index.html, domain.com/index.html, etc.) all other pages with those same extensions ? Thank you for your help! Erin
On-Page Optimization | | HiddenPeak0 -
Internal Linking - in content vs navigation menu
Would like to get some thoughts on whether navigation menus or in-content links are best for internal linking, from an SEO standpoint. A few thoughts to get started with: For sites with a lot of content, you can have a navigation menu linking to your higher-level pages, then in-content links to deeper pages on your site. For smaller sites, this is not an option, as the navigation menu will probably link to all your important pages. You could add in-content links, but Google only counts the first link on the page, so the in-content links would be ignored if you'd already linked yp the page in your top nav menu. I can think of several possible reasons navigation menu links could be less desirable than in content links from a Google perspective. (They are sitewide boilerplate content without context.) If you setup your navigation structure based on what is best for the user, small sites don't have much wiggle room to optimize internal link structure, as all their money pages will be linked to from the top nav menu. Do you think Google prefers in content links to navigation menu links? If so, how do you get around the fact that for many sites, all their money pages are being linked to from their main navigation menu?
On-Page Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
Temporary Redirect
I am having lot of Temporary Redirect on my reports, and all the links points to my ads server (openX). like this: http://ads.espectador.com/mod2/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a04fb31e&cb=138097 Here in this page there is an example.- How can I fix this? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | informatica8100 -
Why does the on page report reports a full path link as Cannibalize link?
On the seomoz on page report i get a cannibalize error. This is due to a link being full path. When i change the link to relative path then there is no Cannibalize error. Should i change the internal links of the site to relative path? I would appreciate your help.
On-Page Optimization | | pickaweb0 -
100 links on one page
we're recommended 100 links or less on one page. is the 100 links including header and footer links?
On-Page Optimization | | jallenyang0 -
Number of links in breadcrumb
Does google take the number of links in breadcrumb as a indicator to the depth of the page in the site structure? That will mean that a page with 5 links in the breadcrumb is a page very far away from the index, therefore a less important page.
On-Page Optimization | | seo.academy0