SEO starter - Canonical URL tag and 301 Redirect

301 Redirect

Photo courtesy of bestrank.com

Running a little further with the Canonical URL tag theme from last post of Google’s latest solution to Duplicate Content, TG did another search on the same topic in order to have a better understanding of the usage of the tag.

TG found this post “Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps” very useful as it consolidates pieces of information in one post which makes it valuable for beginner.

Prior to the use of the Canonical url tag, webmasters usually adopt the 301redirect to tell browser that the old page is gone and take users to a new page. The practice is smarter than using 401 error page. One should take note that the Canonical URL Tag cannot address to all the issues raised by the duplicate content across domain names

Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest http://www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com.

To read more information, you can try “How to redirect a web page, the smart way” by Steven Hargrove or Matt Cutts’ s blog.

The new post by randfish spells out the differences between a 301 redirect and the Canonical url tag. It specifies that 301 can redirect a page from one domain to another domain while Canonical Url tage operates solely on one single root domain.

TG also loves the illustration he used in the post.

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