301s Or Stick With Canonical?

[HB17]

Hello all! A nice interesting one for you on this fine Friday...

I have some pages which are accessible by 2 different urls - This is for user experience allowing the user to get to these pages in two different ways. To keep Google happy we have a rel canonical so that Google only sees one of these urls to avoid duplicates.

After some SEO work I need to change both of these urls (on around 1,000 pages). Is the best way to do this...

To 301 every old url to every new url

Or... To not worry as I will just point the indexed pages to the new rel canonical?

Any ideas or suggestions would be brilliant.

Thanks!

[calindaniel]

Hi Harry,

If I'm understanding your question, both the 301 and the rel=canonical would technically be correct.

However, if I were in your position and had two old URLs, let's call them:

• www.example.com/tennis-shoes
• www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2

And, I was changing my URL structure to:

• www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes
• www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2

I would implement a 301 redirect for the two old pages to the new page (the one that doesn't have the rel=canonical applied). Assuming of course you don't have website restrictions that would make the update problematic. Then add the rel=canonical tag to the duplicate page as you did before.

Moz has some really great resources as well that you can check out:

• https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
• https://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

[HB17]

Hi Calin,

Thank you very much for your response. Just to confirm I am understanding you correctly, you are suggesting
the following approach:

1. Do a 301 Redirect on both old and currently indexed URLs

• www.example.com/tennis-shoes [currently canonicalised to www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2]
• www.example.com/tennis-shoes-2

To

www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2 [The URL we want google to index]

2. www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes [canonicalise to www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2]

The second step will prevent any duplicate content issues given the content will still be accessible
from this URL as well [www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes]

Finally it shouldn't be a problem to have a canonical tag on the www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2
to itself as we might need just in case the URL is accessed say using a query string (www.example.com/products/tennis-shoes-2?type=sports)?

Once again, thank you for taking your time to reply.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I agree with Calin.  Just a canonical would not be ideal because Google is not good at removing things from the index without a redirect or an explicit request in Webmaster Tools.  Canonicals don't stack up in this regard.

[calindaniel]

You got it!