: Use rel=canonical or 301 redirect On my site both of these return the same content: http://example.com/tags/sky http://example.com/tags/sky/page1 Using rel=canonical on page1 increases the coding

@Cofer257

The actual concept of Canonical Tags is for Search Engine not for user. 301 Redirect is for Bots and Humans (Users).
Put Canonical to these pages


example.com/tags/sky/page1

not redirect them. Because If you redirect them so User will not access further pages of these SKY tags.

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@Si4351233

Without 301 redirects, two same pages could be considered like a duplicate for some search engine (there is a life out of google search engine). On the other hand, if you create 301 redirects, any search engines will understand the target page.

Still canonical is useful because sometimes bots & scripts add variables like: myvar=blabla at the end of the url. I think about the case when your page can be displayed with the same content from a different url with a variable at the end and you are not aware of it. Canonical ensures that any bots will understand the real url.

Consequently, i think both 301 redirects and canonical are important because they are different (see answer from Rishi)

Nevertheless, 301 redirect is better because it is more widely recognized according to Matt Cutts

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@Mendez628

Short answer Yes.

The difference between the two as clearly pointed by this article:


301 – Hey, Search Engines: My page is no longer here, and has permanently moved to a new page. Please remove it from your index and
pass credit to the new page.

Canonical – Hey, (most) Search Engines: I have multiple versions of this page (or content), please only index this version. I'll keep
the others available for people to see, but don't include them in your
index and please pass credit to my preferred page.

Regarding the amount of PageRank or link juice that would be lost from
canonical redirects, Cutts has also said "there's really not a whole
lot of difference" between the 301 and the canonical. This means the
301 and the canonical will lose "just a tiny little bit, not very much
at all" of credit from the referring page.


In either case (301 or Canonical) between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) is passed to the redirected page.

At SEO advice: url canonicalization Matt Cutts says that


Suppose you want your default url to be www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).


An article on juice and PR

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