Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?

[Omnipress]

I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus.

The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes)

http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx

(I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider)

So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this:

http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" />

With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in?

For Example:

http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/

will become

http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man

My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page?

I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!

[SEODinosaur]

It depends,

Doing a 301 will transfer the search engine/user from Page A to Page B which is fine. However, if Page B and Page C have a similar URL structure like the first example you gave I would recommend using a canonical tag.

I would recommend using a canonical tag in any case, to let the search engine spider know which page you want it to crawl. If the content/URL is very similar on two pages or more I would highly recommend it to avoid duplication.

[kyleNeedham]

You only need to use a 301.

Ps. Your links are going to 404 pages

[KyleChamp]

If your using a 301 redirect, there is no need to use the Rel=canonical tag. However, I would like to point out that the rel=canonical tag is basically made for this type of situation where your CMS is creating multiples of the same page. So adding a rel=canonical tag looks to be exactly what you’re looking for.

[Visiblics]

Hi,

Canonical tag is only required if the search engines are able to access both the pages. There is no need to apply canonical tag as long as the duplicate pages are being redirected to the new/original page.

As you've specifically mentioned to Google that these page do not exist anymore and I've created a new page for all these pages, and now you want your visitors/search engines to visit the new page which doesn't have any duplicate entry.

Canonical tag only works if you're running a

• multilingual website or
• you're using some query strings for tacking purpose
• you've multiple copies of the one page and those page can not be deleted.

If you're sure that after 301 redirect there will not be any duplicate entry for the page, you don't need to apply canonical tag.

Hope it helps

[BlueprintMarketing]

no what you need to do is out of the conocal URL reference whatever is going to be shown to the user as the preferable content so if the pages http://www.omnipress.com/boss-woman" />

and next pages

">http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" />  you will of course need 301 redirect as usual and anyone that tells you rel="canonical is not important does not understand much about SEO and that's not a sly on anyone.

rel="canonical Tells Google where the original pages are it no matter what helps you immensely who searc it on SEOmoz see what Rand has to say   or we could just look at this link that claims it's the most important advancement in SEO since site maps so please do use a canonical-url-tag http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

here is exactly how to implement them and I wish you all the best. http://www.metatags.org/rel_canonical

Sincerely,

Thomas