When Should I Use a Canonical vs. a 301 Redirect?
Before we dive in, we need to understand the differences between a 301 and a canonical tag. 301 Redirects: A 301 redirect is a way of permanently moving one URL to another. From a user perspective, they type in one URL and magically get a different one. No content is loaded on the original URL, it just redirects to the new place. Most ways of doing this introduce a small delay in load times, but with CDNs and caching and modern technology, it really isn’t something we need to worry about. There’s a ton of different ways to implement a 301 redirect. If you’re on Apache you can do them in your .htaccess file. It’s a bit different on Windows hosting. You can even use a scripting language to do a redirect in code, although I would prefer to do it at the .htaccess level if possible. The various ways to do redirects are beyond the scope of this article. Canonical Tags: The canonical tag has been around for a long time. It’s coming up on its 12th birthday, but SEO pros still continue to s