Help with steps to take when fixing cannonical url structure?
-
I would like to 301 redirect all the variations of my site to a single url but would like some clarification on some issues. I have always been confused about how to handle cannonicalization and hopefully this can clear it up for me and others.
This particular site is about 1 year old and gets approximately 15k uniques a month in a great niche. I want to make sure I do this correctly as to not hurt my existing rankings which are quite good. Here is is what I am unsure about.
- Basically I should pick the best url structure to redirect all the others to correct? What determines what url is best to redirect all the rest to? is it www.domain.com, http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com?
- Is the best one to redirect to always standard and something I should set up at the beginning of my site? Or is picking the best url to redirect to based on what url starts to rank in google and you then use that one?
- Should I be going through each of my rankings and seeing what url is ranking in google for each page? On this particular site ALL of my urls in google have no www. or http but instead show up in the SE as domain.com or domain.com/inner-page/html. In that case what do I do?
- I know the slow way to do redirects. I use my hostgator account and do it in cpanel and do it one by one. Is there a faster way where I can go and make lots of changes at once? Maybe I can choose all the variations and put in the one I want them all to redirect to?
- After I figure the above out is fixing all of this as simple as redirecting ALL variations to the one I will use moving forward for each page on my site? Then I am done?
Thanks again for the help!
Jake
-
is there a simple code I put somewhere in there?
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]replace "mysite" with the name of your site
do you see on there that he says its important to leave trailing / on folders
Generally speaking a URL that ends in a slash represents a folder. A URL that ends without a slash represents a page or file.
With respect to www or non-www, there is absolutely no preference from a pure SEO perspective. Either way you chose I would use the http:// prefix as it represents the complete URL.
-
Awesome Ryan! Thank you. This kind of stuff is the part I am SO lost about. I bet I would increase my rankings 500% if I could figure out the technical stuff!
Ok just quick clarification.
So there is no "better" version between http:// and http://www.? That is what I thought but on this guide it says that http://www. is best? http://static.seomoz.org/user_files/SEO_Web_Developer_Cheat_Sheet.pdf
I guess to be safe I could do that but I wonder if it really matters?Also do you see on there that he says its important to leave trailing / on folders.
I do know how to access my htaccess file is there a simple code I put somewhere in there? I am going to go with http://
Thanks for the awesome help!
Jake
-
What determines what url is best to redirect all the rest to? is it www.domain.com, http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com?
The "http://" portion is required for a complete URL. "http://www.domain.com" is the same as "www.domain.com". If you omit the "http://" prefix, all major browsers understand your request and will prepend the URL appropriately.
You can choose either the "www" or "non-www" form of the URL to represent your site. It doesn't matter to search engines. What does matter is that you make a choice and remain consistent.
For an existing site, examine the links you have to both URL forms. As a guide, I would recommend choosing the URL format which has the most authorative linking domains.
Is the best one to redirect to always standard and something I should set up at the beginning of my site?
Yes. You should choose before the site begins attracting traffic.
Should I be going through each of my rankings and seeing what url is ranking in google for each page?
You should make one choice for your entire site. It would be a really bad idea to have some pages use the "www" subdomain while others do not. You would be dividing your traffic into two separate domains which you do not want to do.
Use OpenSiteExplorer.org and Google WMT to determine which domain has the most linking authority.
Is there a faster way where I can go and make lots of changes at once?
You can redirect your entire site with a single statement in htaccess. Since you are using cPanel there is probably a "Redirect" application you can use to make this change. I would recommend contacting hostgator and informing them of your wishes. It is very quick and easy for a managed host to make the change for you. If you are not familiar with the process, it is far better to allow them to make the change for you.
Summary: review your backlinks, make your choice, inform hostgator and request them to make the change. After, test the change. If you choose to keep the "www" prefix, try accessing a few pages without the prefix. You should reach the page and see the "www" portion added to the URL. If the process is set up correctly you are 100% done.
Some SEOs may advise you to use canonicals or update your choice in Google/Bing Webmaster Tools. You can do both but once you set the redirect correctly the results will take care of themselves. Expect it can take up to a month for all of your URLs to appear correctly in SERPs. If you update the change in WMT, it will appear faster in SERPs.
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
-
Urls Too Long - Should I shorten?
On the crawl of our website we have had a warning that 157 have urls that are too long. When I look at the urls they are generally from 2016 or earlier. Should I just leave them as they are or shorten the urls and redirect to new url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon4 -
PDF Optimization Question: Does URL Structure Matter?
Hi Mozzers: I am optimizing a bunch of PDF brochures within a client's website. Besides the typical optimization tactics I'm applying, (like these) I have a question regarding the file/url structure of the PDFs themselves. By default, the client is locating PDFs in an 'uploads' folder of their Wordpress site. So, a typical PDF might have a URL such as: https://www.Xyzinsurance.com/xyz-content/uploads/2015/06/Brochure-XYZ-Connect.pdf My question: is there any advantage in eliminating all these sub-directories and moving the files into a main folder, simply titled '/brochures' ?? Any insights or conjecture would be welcome!
Technical SEO | | Daaveey0 -
How to fix an 803 error?
Error Code 803: Incomplete HTTP Response Received How can I fix this error?
Technical SEO | | netprodjb0 -
Which url should i use? Thanks!
I have a question regarding how to use my url, we are a Swedish-based website which have the url, http://interimslösning.se/ (that contains the Swedish letter “ö”) so the url can also be written as http://xn--interimslsning-3pb.se/. Which of the following url should I use for my backlinks, http://interimslösning.se/ or http://xn--interimslsning-3pb.se/ ? What is the difference between them regarding SEO? And is it good or bad to use letter like "ö" or other characters like that in your url? I was thinking that maybe it is good to use the letter "ö" for local search optimization in sweden, but i don't know.. Thanks in advance! Greetings,
Technical SEO | | Kiwibananlime
Paul Linderoth0 -
Multilingual blogs and site structure
Hi everyone, I have a question about multilingual blogs and site structure. Right now, we have the typical subfolder localization structure. ex: domain.com/page (english site) domain.com/ja/page (japanese site) However, the blog is a slightly more complicated. We'd like to have english posts available in other languages (as many of our users are bilinguals). The current structure suggests we use a typical domain.com/blog or domain.com/ja/blog format, but we have issues if a Japanese (logged in) user wants to view an English page. domain.com/blog/article would redirect them to domain.com/ja/blog/article thus 404-ing the user if the post doesn't exist in the alternate language. One suggestion (that I have seen on sites such as etsy/spotify is to add a /en/ to the blog area: ex domain.com/en/blog domain.com/ja/blog Would this be the correct way to avoid this issue? I know we could technically work around the 404 issue, but I don't want to create duplicate posts in /ja/ that are in English or visa versa. Would it affect the rest of the site if we use a /en/ subfolder just for the blog? Another option is to use: domain.com/blog/en domain.com/blog/ja but I'm not sure if this alternative is better. Any help would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Seiyav0 -
Fixing Crawl Errors
Hi! I moved my Wordpress blog back in August, and lost much of my site traffic. I recently found over 1000 crawl errors in Webmaster Tools because some of my redirects weren't transferred, so we are working on fixing the errors and letting Google know. I'm wondering how long I should expect for Google to recognize that the errors have been fixed and for the traffic to start returning? Thanks! Jodi - momsfavoritestuff.com
Technical SEO | | JodiFTM0 -
Landing Page URL Structure
We are finally setting up landing pages to support our PPC campaigns. There has been some debate internally about the URL structure. Originally we were planning on URL's like: domain.com /california /florida /ny I would prefer to have the URL's for each state inside a "state" folder like: domain.com /state /california /florida /ny I like having the folders and pages for each state under a parent folder to keep the root folder as clean as possible. Having a folder or file for each state in the root will be very messy. Before you scream URL rewriting :-). Our current site is still running under Classic ASP which doesn't support URL rewriting. We have tried to use HeliconTech's ISAPI rewrite module for IIS but had to remove it because of too many configuration issues. Next year when our coding to MVC is complete we will use URL rewriting. So the question for now: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to one URL structure over the other?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
Rel cannonical on all my URL's
Hi, sorry if this question has already been asked, but I can't seem to find the correct answer. In my crawling report for the domain: http://www.wellbo.de I get rel cannonical notices. I have redirected all pages of http://wellbo.de to http://www.wellbo.de with a 301 redirect. Where is my error? Why do I get these notices? I hope the image helps. Ep7Rw.jpg
Technical SEO | | wellbo0