301 redirect or rel=canonical
-
On my site, which I created with Joomla, there seems to be a lot of duplicated pages. I was wondering which would be better, 301 redirect or rel=canonical.
On SeoMoz Pro "help" they suggest only the rel=canonical and dont mention 301 redirect. However, ive read many other say that 301 redirect should be the number one option.
Also, does 301 redirect help solve the crawling errors, in other words, does it get rid of the errors of "duplicate page content?"
Ive read that re-=canonical does not right?
Thanks!
-
No worries Kyu! Just a funny thing about the internet
Sounds like you are doing some great digging today and are being smart about it. I hope it resolves your issues.
Thanks for being thoughtful.
-
Hi Owen,
The first thumbs down was not me. I thought maybe that I did it on accident so I pushed it again thinking it would negate it, but it added another thumbs down. So Im pretty sure the first one was not me....unless ur allowed to thumbs down twice....
I will try to find a way to undo the thumbs down i did on accident.
Sorry about that and I definitely do appreciate your willingness to help. I am not sure who gave u the thumbs down
Edit: I replaced the thumbs down with a thumbs up
-
Interesting that someone would take the time to thumbs down my post.
That kind of behavior definitely gives me less desire to help people out.
-
301 redirects basically tell browsers (and search engines) - "Hey this page no longer exists at this URL it is now located here" statistically, you also lose 1-10% of link juice when you 301 redirect a page, and, for duplicate content issues, should be avoided unless it's absolutely necessary.
The rel=canonical tag, however, is a way to tell search engines the preferred version of a given URL. The good thing about this is that you don't lose link juice, and generally it is the least intrusive way to implement a fix to duplicate content issues.
If you were to implement a 301 redirect, you'd have to consider that all of these URLs are different (duplicate content wise) and would need a redirect implemented to a single url:
http://domain.com/sample-page/
http://domain.com/Sample-Page/
etc...etc...etc...
You can see that it can get tedius. By setting will get you the desired results much easier, than implementing tons of 301s.
Hope this helps
-
Thanks for that!
Do you know if SEOmoz crawlers can pick up redirects?
In other words, will errors still come up when the SEOMOZ crawls?
-
Canonical tends to be the easiest/quickest method to address these issues. The main difference is that with a 301 the user and the search engine experience the same thing. Whereas with a canonical a user could still access the duplicate page - which in some cases might not be the best user experience. Also, Bing does not follow the directive of a canonical tag.
Here is a good background from Google:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google ranking 301 redirected vanity urls
We use vanity URLs for offline marketing. An example vanity URL would be www.clientsite.com/promotion, this URL 301 redirects to a page on the site with tracking parameter ex: www.clientsite.com/mainpage?utm_source=source&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=xyz. We are running into issues with Google ignoring the 301 redirect and ranking these vanity URLs instead of the actual page on the website. Any suggestions on how to resolve?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalhound0 -
Is This 301 redirection correct??
Hello Everyone, I have Added This in .htaccess. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] ErrorDocument 404 /index.html Is this Correct ?? or need any change, please help, thanx in advace .0 -
Can Googlebots read canonical tags on pages with javascript redirects?
Hi Moz! We have old locations pages that we can't redirect to the new ones because they have AJAX. To preserve pagerank, we are putting canonical tags on the old location pages. Will Googlebots still read these canonical tags if the pages have a javascript redirect? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
301 redirect recommendations
One of our clients we are working on have two sites the main with a PR5 and a separate one with a PR4. We are planning on doing a 301 from the PR4 to a page on the PR5 Is it best to do: www.PR4.com ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page or www.PR4.com/page ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page Most pages on the PR4 site can fit into one PR5 page logically. However the PR4 has an about us, contact us, blog/with posts, FAQ, Applications, Legal Resources which are all pretty out dated.. The PR4 site is kinda messy and we are not sure if it will be easy to 301 each page individually with the user in mind. can we do a sitewide 301 redirect from the root PR4.com to a page PR/5.com/releveantPR4page and also do deeper 301's? PR4.com/PR4page ---> PR5.com/releveantPR4page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Bad use of the Rel="canonical" tag
Google is currently ranking my category page instead of our homepage for our key term and we would rather have our homepage rank for the term. Would it be a bad idea to rel="canonical" our category page to our homepage? Our homepage is optimized to rank for the keyword and has more PR than our category page. However, I don't really know if this will have negative repercussions. Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason_3420 -
External links point to 403 page - how to 301 redirect if no file extension?
Hi guys, After moving from an old static .htm site to Wordpress, I 301'd all old .htm urls fine to the new trailing slash foldery style /wordpress-urls/ in htaccess no problem. But Google Webmaster Tools tells me I still have hundreds of external links pointing to a similar version of the old urls (but without the .htm), giving lots of not founds and 403s. Example of the urls linked to that 403 not found: http://www.mydomain.com/filename So I'm wondering how I do a 301 redirect from a non-exisiting url that also has no file extention as above and is not like a folder? This seems like a lot of possible external link juice to lose. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Duplicate Content / 301 redirect Ariticle issue
Hello, We've got some articles floating around on our site nlpca(dot)com like this article: http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html that's is not linked to from anywhere else. The article exists how it's supposed to be here: http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ (our other website) Would it be safe in eyes of both google's algorithm (as much as you know) and with Panda to just 301 redirect from http://www.nlpca.com/what-is-dynamic-spin-release.html to http://www.dynamicspinrelease.com/what-is-dsr/ or would no-indexing be better? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Canonical tag vs 301
What is the reason that 301 is preferred and not rel canonical tag when it comes to implementing redirect. Page rank will be lost in both cases. So, why prefer one over the other ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050