Should I use a canonical tag or 301 with Wordpress posts?

[RichardInFlorida]

Hi all,

I'm trying to determine if canonical or 301 is a better way of handling an issue on my site.

The Background

I've got a Wordpress website where pages are in-depth reference articles and the posts are for short news blurbs. When I produce a new resource page, I also make a short post telling readers about the new resource. I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plug in.

Sometimes, Google will rank the 200 word post higher than the 2000 word resource page. I suspect that is because of the order in which they were crawled by Google, but I do not know for sure.

The Question

To make sure that the resource page is seen as the most important location on the site for the topic, should I use the canonical section in the Yoast plugin on the post to point to the page? Or should I wait, and after a few days (when the news blurb is off of the first page) just 301 the post to the page?

Are there any link juice considerations when using the canonical option?

Thanks for the help!

Richard

[RichardInFlorida]

Awesome information. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

-Richard

[trung.ngo]

Hi Richard,

My initial recommendation based on this information is to use a canonical rather than a 301 redirect, assuming that the content on the shorter news blurb is similar enough to the resource page. This will allow for both pages to exist, while consolidating indexing signals, such as link equity, to the longer resource page. I'd imagine you want both pages on your site for usability purposes, e.g. users might visit your news section more frequently and they can see the announcement for the new resource. In contrast, the 301 would effectively remove the news page from your site, because it would simply redirect to the resource page. And from a link equity perspective, 301s and canonicals offer the same value based on the information currently available.

I suspect that the news page is ranking higher than the resource page because of your site architecture: blog/news pages may be receiving more internal links and from stronger pages than resource pages. That's definitely something you might want to look into if you're seeing this issue--news blurbs outranking the actual resource--happening consistently.

If you do go with the canonical option, be sure to use the full URL in the reference instead of absolute path, e.g. www.example.com/resource-name instead of the relative path, /resource-name.

-Trung