Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
-
Hi,
Newbie alert!
I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly.
The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags.
Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new?
Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case?
Thx in anticipation.
-
The most accurate way is to do it manually. Doing a site:YOURDOMAIN.com in Google will alert you to most of the ugly URLs you want to get rid of.
-
Thanks for that David . . . makes sense.
Can you recommend any tools to help with this job or is it still mostly a manual process?
Cheers.
-
"Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new?"
Any URL's that are indexed should be redirected to the correct version. For example if you have both a database URL and a canonical URL both indexed in search results, then they both should be sent to the correct version.
Also, having only canonical URLs in your submitted sitemaps will help to remove a lot of these, even without redirects.
-
Ok, here is my understanding regarding canonicals and how it works with redirect. 301 redirect means the old URL is shifting its all value and user to the new domain (unlike 302 that only derives traffic but contain the URL value to itself only).
Whereas Canonicals indicates Google the preferred version of the domain so theoretically if you use the canonicals on every page Google should pick the redirected page as 301 will take Google to the final destination anyways…
What will I do?
If Possible, I will map all the redirected URLs and remove canonicals from there just to be on the safe side but I don’t think having there will be much of a difference as Google as at least that smart.
Hope this helps!
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
-
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Proper 301 redirect code for http to https
I see lots of suggestions on the web for forwarding http to https. I've got several existing sites that want to take advantage of the SSL boost for SEO (however slight) and I don't want to lose SEO placements in the process. I can force all pages to be viewed through the SSL - that's no problem. But for SEO reasons, do I need to do a 301 redirect line of code for every page in the site to the new "https" version? Or is there a way to catch all with one line of code that Google, etc. will recognize & honor?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith10 -
Redirect non slash to slash
Hello SEO gurus We have an issue here ( www.xyz.com.au) is having 200 responses www.xyz.com.au and www.xyz.com.au/ ( when i ran the crawl test i found this ) We have been advised to do a 301 from non slash to slash ( as our other pages are showing up with slash ) for the consistency we decided to go with this but our devs just couldnt do it. Error is - redirect loop and this site is a wordpress one Can anyone help us with this issue? Help is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Pack0 -
How to redirect 302 status to 301 status code using wordpress
I just ran the link opportunity option within site explorer and it shows that 31 pages are currently in a 302 status. Should I try to convert the 302's to 301's? And what is the easiest way to do this? I see several wordpress plugins that claim to do 301 redirects but I don't know which to choose. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | vmsolu0 -
301 redirect relative or absolute path?
Hello everyone, Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones. The way the technical guys did this is: "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
Technical SEO | | Silviu
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html" This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader). The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect? Thanks,
S.0 -
301 redirect from Blogger
Hello, I have a client with a Wordpress network of blogs, each blog is owned by a different blogger. Many of them were migrated time ago from Blogger. I have seen that the way used to redirect them is a meta refresh, so no authority is being passed. I cannot find any reliable way of making a 301 from Blogger, There are some plugins, but I'm afraid of using them. Any of you have experience with this situation please? I have even thought about placing a global rel canonical before the meta refresh, but I think that here the problem is the meta refresh itself.... Thank you in advance
Technical SEO | | Juandbbam0 -
301 Redirect on a PDF, DOCX files?
Hi, I have to rename many pdf and docx files. How can I implement 301 redirect on them as they are linked from 'n' number of places? Regards, Shailendra Sial
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner1 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0