Do Canonical URLs affect page rank?

I have a question hopefully you can help me out with.

I am doing the SEO for a new site that is in development. Some of the pages are individuals profile pages with unique URLs. When an individual creates a profile on our site - one of the key pieces of information for that we will be optimizing in the search engines is their location. Their location will also be included as a keyword in their URL.

For a small minority of inviduals profile pages - the location will change over time so that will have to reflected in the URL. The rest of the content on the page will remain the same.

So we want to use canonical URLs to avoid losing the pagerank built up for individual pages.

My question is....if we use canonical urls will the page rank be affected?

 

to avoid lossing page rank, you should use a 301 redirect form old url to new url.

 

You should use a redirect to the new url.

 

Ok guys - thanks for yoru responses. It seems 301 redirect is the way to go to avoid losing pagerank.

 

Ok how about this instead of using a 301 redirect - use a unique identifier at the end of the url eg:

website.com/location1/firstname.lastname/xxxxxxx

lets say they change their location :

website.com/location2/firstname.lastname/xxxxxxx

The information in the middle of url would change based on changes on the page content - but the unique identifier would remain the same.

Will this work do you think?

Thanks

 

website.com/location1/firstname.lastname/xxxxxxx and website.com/location2/firstname.lastname/xxxxxxx are two different URLs, so Google and the other engines are going to treat them as 2 different web pages in their index. This isn't even really a a URL canonicalization issue... The page has actually permanently moved so you need to 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL.

If website.com/location1/firstname.lastname/xxxxxxx has 100 external backlinks and the person changes locations and their new URL is website.com/location2/firstname.lastname/xxxxxxx, if you don't 301 redirect their old URL to the new URL then the old URL will STILL have 100 external inbound links, their new URL will have none and will be starting from scratch trying to rank.

The search engines don't look ONLY at the xxxxxxx portion of the URL... the look at the whole URL. If any portion of the URL changes (http to https, website.com to www.website.com, location1 to location2, firstname to newfirstname or lastname to new lastname, or xxxxxx to yyyyyyy... if ANYTHING changes in the URL, it's treated as a different page.

So either take the location out of the URL OR when a user changes location and subsequently, their URL... then 301 redirect their old URL to the new URL.

 

Some time it would be effected