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 ?
-
page 1 points to page 2 that points back to page 1.. this or simular situations will make fubar for Google
you can actualy do the same with 301's but it's wayyyy easier to notice.. the rel is allot harder to notice if you do something wrong since it only affects google/bing
-
Thanks. Will you please elaborate how it's possible to make an infinite loop with rel's.
-
301 is a redirect so if you change the url you 301 redirect it to the new url in case links have been built to the old url.
rel canonical is a tag that tells Google this page has similar content to another page to help duplicate content issues, usually used on re-ordering functionality and paging.
-
The quick response to this, is that with 301 your fairly sure that all bots (not only google/Bing) will understand and apart from that it's way easier to manage the 301's then it is to manage rel's. Both should work without a problem but there are allot of pitfalls with rel's fore instance it's possible to make an infinite loop with rel's.
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
-
One Site vs. Many
This is a question that I am not sure has a "right" answer. I am just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on this. I can see benefit of both sides of the coin. In your opinion, is it better to have one large e-commerce site with all of your content on the same domain or is it better to have multiple more targeted domains with your content broken up into smaller chunks? The reason I ask is, I feel like while multiple more targeted sites certainly have the benefit of focus, aren't you taking all your traffic and content, splitting it up and leaving you with several sites that most likely are getting less traffic than one large site would. All opinions welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unikey0 -
Rel Canonical Link on the Canonical Page
Is there a problem with placing a rel=canonical link on the canonical page - in addition to the duplicate pages? For example, would that create create an endless loop where the canonical page keeps referring to itself? Two examples that are troubling me are: My home site is www.1099pro.com which is exactly the same as www.1099pro.com/index.asp (all updates to the home page are made by updating the index.asp page). I want www.1099pro.com/index.asp to have the rel=canonical link to point to my standard homepage www.1099pro.com but any update that I make on the index page is automatically incorporated into www.1099pro.com as well. I don't have access to my hosting web server and any updates I make have to be done to the specific landing pages/templates. I am also creating a new website that could possible have pages with duplicate content in the future. I would like to already include the rel=canonical link on the standard canonical page even though there is not duplicate content yet. Any help really would be appreciated. I've read a ton of articles on the subject but none really define whether or not it is ok to have the rel=canonical link on both the canonical page and the duplicate pages. The closest explanation was in a MOZ article that it was ok but the answer was fuzzy. -Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Rel=canonical
I have seen that almost all of my website pages need rel=canonical tag. Seems that something's wrong here since I have unique content to every page. Even show the homepage as a rel=canonical which doesnt make sense. Can anyone suggest anything? or just ignore those issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arcade880 -
Is there anything wrong with this 301 redirect?
I'll keep this one short and sweet 🙂 Many moons ago we used to have several different methods of sorting our products and this change in sort order was achieved by having ?dispmode=list or ?dispmode=grid after the product URL. Best part of a year ago we decided to scrap this feature and 301'd all the ?dispmode URL's back to the base URL. The funny thing is that Google don't seem to have dropped a single one of the old URL's from their index and a search for site:www.refreshcartridges.co.uk dispmode returns almost 8,000 results. This isn't a massive problem but I'd have expected in the past year they'd have picked up on a couple of the 301's and would have started removing the old results. I'd hate to think we were getting any kind of penalisation for duplicate pages. I know the answer to this question is going to be 'just be patient, the old results will disappear' but just to ensure we're not missing anything stupid. I'd really appreciate it if someone could check out www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/brother-c-223.html?dispmode=list to confirm there's nothing more we could be doing to get these old results removed from the index. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Simple Pagination and Rel Canonical
Hello, I am trying to find a solid solution to this. I think it is simple, but trying to think of a good setup for SEO. If you have a paginated result set, page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4. What i am wondering is, should I point my REL CANONICAL page to Page 1 always, so i'm not loosing power from the first page? Domain structure: www.domain.com/search/[term]/page1/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aactive
www.domain.com/search/[term]/page2/ Should I point all pages to page 1, so I don't get watered down as we go farther into the site? Thoughts?0 -
Link + noindex vs canonical--which is better?
In this article http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 google mentions if you syndicate content, you should include a link and, ideally noindex, the content, if possible. I'm wondering why google doesn't mention including a canonical instead the link + noindex? Is one better than the other? Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Is this structure valid for a canonical tag?
Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
301 Not Allowed...Other Solutions?
A client's site where both the www. and non-www. versions are both being indexed. The non-www. version have has roughly 1000 or so links where the www. version has over twice as much pointing back to the site. In addition, the www. version has higher domain authority. Their programmer has suggested that they can't implement 301's permanent redirects across their site for a few reasons. My question is, what would be the best alternative to block/redirect the non-www. version from being indexed yet still pass link-juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VidenMarketing0