The Purpose Of 301 Redirects & Canonical Links For SEO
Canonical links and 301 redirects are both important for SEO, and each serves very different purposes. They should both be used in specific situations, but the assumption that one can be a substitute for the other will almost always be inaccurate.
The Purpose Of 301 Redirects & Canonical Links For SEO
- Canonical links are used to say one version of copy is duplicate of another, and its purpose is to guide a search engine to the version that should be indexed.
- 301 redirects tell search engines that a page has moved to a new location and guide the search engine to where that location is.
Both of these tools are used for site migrations, combining content, landing pages, URL and slug changes, and more. Here are examples and situations where they’ll both be needed, and you may run into issues if you do one without the other or in the wrong order.
The Purpose Of 301 Redirects & Canonical Links For SEO
Site Migrations
Site migrations are common when you want to change domains or do a rebrand. It could be a single URL for all countries to CCTLDs (country code top level domains) or the reverse. Maybe you used a .us TLD and the .com became available so you want that instead. Your company acquired another and need to combine the two websites, etc… If you’re in ecommerce, you will eventually have to migrate a domain.
The Purpose Of 301 Redirects & Canonical Links For SEO
The order in which you do the canonical links and 301 redirects matters here. A redirect tells a search engine the page no longer has an experience for the user as in the page doesn’t exist (technically doesn’t exist is a 4XX not a 3XX). By having a 301 you are taking both the search engine and user to where this experience now exists.
The Purpose Of 301 Redirects & Canonical Links For SEO
If you do a redirect before the canonical, the canonical will in theory be ignored because the page is supposed to be ignored for the new one. Because the page is ignored and the search engine follows a redirect to a new website that has a new code base,…
The Purpose Of 301 Redirects & Canonical Links For SEO
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