301 redirect or rel=canonical

[waltergah]

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!

[ORob]

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.

[waltergah]

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

[ORob]

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.

[Zachary_Russell]

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/

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

[waltergah]

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?

[ORob]

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