Canonical to page contain redirect 301 to the same page?

Question

I have the below situation, and need your advice in redirect and Canonical meta:

old site: www.example.net/news/example.html

new site: abc.example.com/en/news/example.html

The old site content migrated to the new site and we will use the redirect 301 from old site to the new site on all site pages so if a user open any page on the old site it will be redirected to the same page on the new site in different URL structure as shown above.

Should i add the "rel Canonical" in the new site that pointer to the page on the old site? like this abc.example.com/en/news/example.html--> include

What will happen and what is the affect on SEO and social media?

Answer 1

If you have a 301 redirect structure in place, you don't need canonicals on those pages. In fact, you should not combine 301's and canonicals. You'd be sending search engines a very confusing message, and may wind up with undesired results.

The 301 redirect is for pages that should never be accessed by users. Any user who hits that page gets redirected; the page also eventually disappears from SERPs. You use canonicals when you only want your best version of a page in the SERPs, and the other pages are different versions of that page, and should still be accessible to users, but not listed in SERPs.

As a side note, when you use canonical URL's, don't point to the lesser URL from your intended one. Your intended URL should point to itself. Your other versions of that page should point to the one you intend to show up in SERPs, not themselves.

Answer 2

According to the Search Console Help of Google and Google Webmaster Central Blog, with rel=canonical you can to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. In your case, this will be your new website: <link rel=canonical href=https://abc.example.com/en/news/example.html /> . If your old website also has rel=canonical, then you need to remove all rel=canonical. Be sure to include in sitemap of the new website, all links of new website and remove all old links. By these actions you will tell search engines and social networks about your preferred web pages.