301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?

[ztalk112]

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.

[MoosaHemani]

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!

[David-Kley]

"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.

[ztalk112]

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.

[David-Kley]

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.