Hi Eric,

I was at Step 3 of your 3 Step plan, looking for confirmation as to whether or not the 301 redirects were required in this situation.

Thanks!

Hello,

Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links).

Links that used to send to
example.com/webpage.html

Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/

Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash).

We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash.

However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?

For anybody that is interested in knowing, after 10 days of webmaster monitoring, here are our conclusions:

We have 2 sitemaps (2 languages). It took a few days for Google to re-download the mains sitemap, and a few more days to download the secondary sitemap, however, the new sitemaps were both picked up by Google with no intervention on our part.

Bing, however, has still no downloaded either of the updated sitemaps.

Because it's so easy and isn't seen as bad practice, we will be manually re-submitting sitemap updated to both search engines.

Thanks!

Hello Mozers,

Our sitemaps were submitted to Google and Bing, and are successfully indexed. Every time pages are added to our store (ecommerce), we re-generate the xml sitemap.

My question is: should we be resubmitting the sitemaps every time their content change, or since they were submitted once can we assume that the crawlers will re-download the sitemaps by themselves (I don't like to assume).

What are best practices here?

Thanks!

Great - thanks for the info guys!

Hello,

I'm wondering, are 'nofollow' links from websites with high domain authority beneficial? Would they boost our own DA?

In essence, I'm wondering if there is added value (other than visitors clicking the link) to being linked to by a 'nofollow' link.

Thanks!

Will do.

the 301s will stay because they redirect the old (indexed and ranking) URL's to the new ones.

The Canonical Tags will all be removed.

Then 1 more question:
How do you suggest I deal with URL parameters that cause duplicate content. Some examples:

?color=
?manufacturer=
?width=

etc. We have hundreds of these - they are used to allow customers to filter or sort the product listings.

Should we set them to be ignored via Webmaster tools?

Thanks for the info Shane.

Regarding pagination:
let's say we sell staplers.

?p=1 will be the first 10 stapler models
?p=2 will be stapler models 11-20
?p=3 will be stapler models 21-30
...and so on. Each page presents a different set of stapler models.
Keep in mind that each URL has the same Title and Meta Info.

We could choose to show all staplers on a single page and eliminate pagination, but this would affect loading time.

Yes we incidentally use Canonical tags and 301 redirects, which were implemented for different reasons.

The 301 redirect was implemented to redirect from old category URLs on old website (no longer live) which were indexed and had good ranking to the new category URLs on the new website.

The canonical URL on the other hand was implemented in hope of avoiding duplicate content of the new URLs.
For example if you were to navigate to the URL

www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=1

You would see the stapler models 1 to 10 of 50 (so 5 pages).
Now you can either go to the next pages, or you can 'filter'.

Let's say you choose to filter by color, because you really want a red stapler, the resulting URL would be

www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?color=red

You could now choose to filter by other characteristics or go to the next page (still with red filter on), so the URL would be

www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?color=red?p=2

Again, since all that's happening here is either changing page or filtering the products, the Title and Meta Info is the same, but the URLs are different, and the selection of products being presented is also different.

Hi everyone, I'm new here - always loved SEOMoz and glad to be part of the Pro community now.

I have 2 questions regarding the Canonical URL tag.

Some background info:

We used to run an OsCommerce store, and recently migrated to Magento. In doing so, we right away created 301 redirects of the old category pages (OsCommerce) to the new category pages (Magento) via the Magento admin. Example:

www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
301 redicrected to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html

In Magento admin, we have enabled the Canonical tag for all product and category pages. Here's how Magento sets up the Canonical tag:

The URL of interest which we want to rank is:
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html

However Magento sets up the canonical tag on this page to point to:
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html

When using the SEOMoz On Page Report Card, it pick this up as an error because the Canonical tag is pointing to a different URL.

However, if we dig a little deeper, we see that the URL being pointed to
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
has a 301 redirect to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html
which is the URL we wan to rank.

So because we set up a 301 redirect of the old-page to the new-page, on the new-page the canonical tag points to the old-page.

Question 1)
What are you opinions on this? Do you think this method of setting up the Canonical tag is acceptable?

Second question...

We use pagination for category pages, so if we have 50 products in one category, we would have 5 pages of 10 products. The URL's would be:

www.example.com/new-widget-category.html (which is the SAME as ?p=1)
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=1
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=2
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=3
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=4
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=5

Now ALL the URLs above have the canonical tag set as:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/new-widget-category" />

However, the content of each page (page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is different because different products are displayed. So far most what I read regarding the Canonical tag is that it is used for pages that have the same content but different URLs.

I would hope that Google would combine the content of all 5 pages and view the result as a single URL www.example.com/new-widget-category

Question 2) Is using the canonical tag appropriate in the case described above?

Thanks !