At some points in your work with web page redirection, it can feel that you are simply dodging bombs and at your luck will eventually run out. Enter in the 301 redirect, and canonical options. These have been around for years, and yet throughout the industry they continue to bring debate and stir up questions on how to best approach them. In this article we will be looking at the two main methods to manage both the 301 redirect, as well the canonical attribute. Naturally, we will show you how to better the duplicate content issues, sustain your rankings and lastly how to improve the all important user experience. Before we dive in, lets make sure we are all on the same page with what the difference between 301 redirects and canonical redirects. In laymen terms: a 301 redirect communicates to search engines that this 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. a canonical redirect communicates to the search engine that, I have multiple versions of this page, but please only index this version. People can see the other versions, but please do not put them in your index thanks! 301 Redirects We have all seen the standard 301 HTTP status code that is mean to mange the complete and permanent redirection of page. Once this is established, in theory you will eventually pass the majority of the original page's link authority relevance as well as its ranking power to the page that you are redirecting to. A 301 redirect informs both the user and Google of this change. However, in realty we know that this can be trying process in which success is measured by increments rather than full authority all at once. Common issues with the 301 The first issue you may face is that it takes a long time, and I mean you are going to have to take a few turns of the calendar until some search engines will attribute authority to the redirected page. Naturally, this depends on how often your page is crawled by the...
