What is the difference between 301 redirects and rel canonical tags?

[aryanmarshall45]

What is the difference between 301 redirects and rel canonical tags?

[theshail]

301 redirect automatically sends real visitor to another page.

rel canonical tag tells search engine bots that current page is secondary one and primary page is different one. This tag is mainly used when by anyhow same is opening at 2 or more different urls in a domain. This way you can avoid duplicate pages problem.

[fauzsp]

A 301 redirect is designed to help users and search engines find pieces of content that have moved to a new URL. Adding a 301 redirect means that the content of the page has permanently moved somewhere else.

[shahzaibkhatri]

I was looking for a short answer what actually is rel canonical tag. But I was hesitant over going through the whole content all the times. Thank you theshail for describing it in a very simple way.

[syedmuddassar]

301 redirect automatically sends real visitor to another page.

rel canonical tag tells search engine bots that current page is secondary one and primary page is different one. This tag is mainly used when by anyhow same is opening at 2 or more different urls in a domain. This way you can avoid duplicate pages problem.

Yes i agree with you :) Nice reply thanks

[leejenifer]

you can read a blog post on SEOMOZ. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect ... ld-you-use.

[Manov]

They are completely different in how they are designed to be implemented.

301 redirects say "this page as permanently moved to this new address, let me redirect you". Search engines use this as a signal to update the address of an indexed page.

rel canonical, as others have said, deal with duplicate content. Specifically it deals with URL issues that may cause a page to be indexed as two or more separate pages. For instance, you might have a product at example.com/product.php but you notice your affiliate links like example.com/product.php?affiliate=123 are being indexed. A canonical tag can say "search engine, of all the variables of this page, this address is the true address". Another example would be a category page that generates a different URL based on sort order. Google uses rel canonical as a hint, so it may or may not take it into account. I do not know clearly how Bing/Yahoo are using it.

[blessy_smith]

301 Redirect is best for website redirect purpose. canonical tags use for duplicate content issue.

[michaelclarke]

301 Redirect You can use for better promotion