: Unifying pages: 301 or canonical I'm combining three existing urls into one. Till now I have: http://mydomain.com/folder1/page1 http://mydomain.com/folder2/page2 http://mydomain.com/folder3/page3 Content from

@Kimberly868

I believe a 301 redirect to be the appropriate solution here - John Conde is correct in my opinion.

Search engines don't seem to strategically penalize page ranking where duplicate content is found however since they want so show users a variety of page results and not lots of identical results with just different URL's what they really want to establish is which page to include and which pages to exclude.

By using 301 redirects to the URL of your choice you get to help the search engines index the page you're most interested in having indexed. The SEO impact from my experience has been an improvement though this can be quite a controversial topic in the SEO world. The only cases where I've seen duplicate content positively impact SEO has been from multiple domain names, not the same domain.

301 redirects normally only attract a penalty if they are chained together - e.g. domain1.com 301 redirecting to domain2.com 301 redirecting to domain3.com, and this penalty is applied due to the wasted bandwidth, wasted DNS lookups and increased end-user page load time.

Hope this helps to clarify.

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@Kevin317

Use a 301 redirect to /folder1/page1. This tells the search engines and users the pages have moved so they can update accordingly. In the case of search engines this means making sure all links to the old URLs are credited to the new URL. In the case of users, their bookmarks (if they use them that is).

It's also a usability issue (albeit a minor one). Users shouldn't see the same content on multiple URLs. It makes it confusing for them.

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