Should you 301, 302, or rel=canonical private pages?

[dsumter]

What should you do with private 'logged in' pages from a seo perspective? They're not visible to crawlers and shouldn't be indexed, so what is best practice? Believe it or not, we have found quite a few back links to private pages and want to get the ranking benefit from them without them being indexed.

Eg: http://twiends.com/settings (Only logged in user can see the page)

302 them: We can redirect users/crawlers temporarily, but I believe this is not ideal from a seo perspective? Do we lose the link juice to this page?

301 them: We can do a permanent redirect with a short cache time. We preserve most link juice now, but we probably mess up the users browser. Users trying to reach a private page while logged out may have issues reaching it after logged in.

**Serve another page with rel=canonical tag: **We could serve back the home page without changing the URL. We use a canonical tag to tell the crawlers that it's a duplicate of the home page. We keep most of the link juice, and the browser is unaffected. Yes, a user might share that different URL now, but its unlikely.

We've been doing 302's up until now, now we're testing the third option. How do others solve this problem? Is there a problem with it?

Any advice appreciated.

[paints-n-design]

A canonical is (guess it was John Mueller who said it) not give you any linkjuice.
He told me in a Webmaster Hangout to use Canonical only for that what it is made for (not for redirects in that hangout-case). Your idea isn't the perfect canonical example.

I would simply redirect everybody (who is not logged in) to a login/sign page. That would be the best thing for the users (UX). You send them to the homepage, wich is not perfect for ux. I would ignore the linkjuice in that case.

[dsumter]

Hi Andreas, are you sure..? According to this article on Moz:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

"The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect"

Did John Mueller say that the tag does not pass link juice? Do you have a link to the hangout recording so that I can check it out..?

Thanks

[paints-n-design]

He said I should use the canonical as what it's made for - he said I shouldn't use it as a redirect - I asked if I should/could use a canonical as redirect and he said: it could happen that google starts to think about it: is it a canonical? should it be a 301? Something like that, and he said I should use redirect Was a german Hangout in September/October.

He didn't say anything about link juice - I just thought it should be that way.

[StephanSolomonidis]

You should 302 redirect non-authenticated users to http://twiends.com/login.

This is a better user experience, and you avoid the potential authentication issues with the 301. It's also not really correct or useful to make it a 301 redirect: users aren't being 'permanently' redirected to the login page, and there's not much utility in forcing link juice to be passed from /settings to /login either.

So requests to /settings should either show that user's settings or 302 redirect to /login. Don't duplicate the home page content and rely on a canonical tag. Your domain (and domain authority) are still going to benefit, and I just don't think there's enough of a case to sculpt the flow of link juice in this way. As Andreas has pointed out, the link juice isn't the most important consideration here; it's better to focus on user experience. Your homepage's ability to rank for any given term is unlikely to be affected by the decision to 'rel=canonical' all private pages to the home page.