What is the difference between rel canonical and 301's?

[edward-may]

Hi Guys

I have been told a few times to add the rel canonical tag to my category pages - however every category page actually is different from the other - besides the listings that I have for my staff on each pages.  Some of them specialise in areas that cross over in other areas - but over really if I'm re directing for eg: Psychic Readings over to Love and Relationships because 5 of my staff members are in both categories - the actual delivering of content and in depth of the actual category which skills are provided at different levels don't justify me creating a rel tag from Psychic Readings over to Love and Relationships just because i have 5 staff members listed under both categories.

Tell me have I got this right or completely wrong?

Here is an eg: Psychic Readings category https://www.zenory.com/psychic-readings

And love and relationships category - https://www.zenory.com/love-relationships

Hope this makes sense - I really look forward to your guys feedback!

Cheers

[DirkC]

Understand what you mean - to be very honest I don't think that this content snippet is generating duplicate content.

However, I don't really understand the mechanism:

https://www.zenory.com/horoscopes/taurus/day -> I would expect to find the daily horoscope for Taurus - when I click on Capricorn I would expect to go to https://www.zenory.com/horoscopes/capricorn/day - however I remain on the same page & the horoscope is shown in a lightbox. I would rather put it on a separate page (if all horoscopes of all signs are present in the HTML of one sign these pages become quite similar when you look at the source code. 
Sounds a bit confusing, but I hope you get what I mean.

rgds,

Dirk

[edward-may]

Hi Dirk

I wanted to ask you another question with regard to this.

I have horoscope pages that have just been published today.

We offer daily horoscope for each star sign (12) these are unique and different each day for each star sign, however there is a weekend love section at the bottom of each page for each star sign that is the same for the whole week.

https://www.zenory.com/horoscopes/taurus/day

https://www.zenory.com/horoscopes/aries/day

Above will show you an example of a couple of the daily horoscopes, you can see the weekend love is different - however it will be the same for the same star sign tomorrow - you can't see these as we have only published and released these today.  So you will be able to tell the difference when tomorrows one is published, but hopefully I have explained myself well here.

So my question will be - half the content on a single page will be duplicate content:  Besides the new daily horoscope entry.  I'm wondering if I need to add canonical tags or if I should create a separate page for the weekend love horoscope of each star sign.

I hope this makes sense!

Thanks again Dirk!

[edward-may]

That answers my question Dirk, thank you again!!!

[DirkC]

For the examples you gave I would certainly not use a 301 or use a canonical tag. The content is unique - and only a relatively small part is common (the list)

To explain the difference:

A canonical tag is used if you have pages that are identical (or almost identical) and which are accessible under different url's. A good example is an e-commerce site with a list of articles like mysite.com/umbrellas - if by sorting the products the url is changing like mysite.com/umbrellas&sort=high it's best to put a canonical so that google will not index all the variations. If you use a canonical on the second url -pointing to the first. A visitor can however still access the pages. Google bot normally respects the canonical - but is not obliged to do so.

A 301 is different - in fact you give the message to the browser: this page is no longer available on this location but has moved to a new location. It's no longer possible to visit the original page (not for humans & not for bots). Google bot has to respect this directive.

A last option you can use is the "noindex/follow". This you normally use for pages that have very little value for search engines, but where you still would like the bots to follow and index the pages which are listed. This you can use for pages of type blog.com/tag/subject - that are generating lists with all the articles marked with subject. In general pages like this are good for cross linking, however have low value for search engines so it's better to not have them indexed.

Hope this clarifies,

Dirk