Discussion on the choice of 301 jump and Rel=canonica

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There is a recent discussion about rel=canonical, and we see a significant number of such problems in the Q&a section of SEOmoz, Dr. Pete wrote about Rel canonical Experiment (English) Blogs get some interesting results as well as Lindsay also wrote the Rel=canonical Guide (English), in addition to some more common problems

When do I use the rel=canonical tag instead of 301?

Is there some way of using rel cannonical tags that will hurt me?

When should I not use the cannonical tag?

What if I can't get developers to implement 301?

I will try to answer these questions

301 jump When to use, how to use

The 310 jump is designed to help users or search engines find that your content has been transferred to a new URL. Adding a 301 jump indicates that the content of the page has been permanently moved somewhere.

301 What does a jump do to the user

Users may well not notice that the URL is redirected to a new URL unless they notice a change in the URL on the browser. Even if the user discovers this, they are not affected as long as the content is still what they were initially looking for. So as long as you can keep the user happy, 301 redirect is no problem as long as the redirected URL does not confuse the user.

301 What does a jump do to a search engine

Theoretically, if a search engine finds a URL that uses 301 redirects, it tracks the redirected URL and then removes the old URL from the index library. Although they may not pass 100% link 2.4bn or anchor text, they should pass some existing link 2.4bn to the new URL. Google says 301 redirects can deliver anchor text but Google does not guarantee it.

Theoretically, a search engine should also remove old pages from their search base so that search engine users cannot find old ones. It may take a little while but usually not more than a few weeks. I have seen some customer pages in a few days old pages old removed, but it has never been static.

301 redirect There may be an error

No difference between 301 and 302

Developers usually confuse the two with a 302 jump instead of 301. I've seen it more than once. The difference is that 302 jumps are used to move content temporarily to somewhere. Link 2.4bn and anchor text are therefore unlikely to be passed. I have mentioned in my previous blog that an example has been highlighted, and if you go to http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/you will find 302 use. I found this a few months ago, and until now I have not solved the problem, I doubt if it is a temporary redirect.

Redirect all pages to a single URL

Another common mistake I've seen involves site migration. An example is if your site has 500 pages that will migrate to other places. You really should put 500 301 redirects on these pages to the relevant pages on the new site. But I often see people redirect these 500 to a URL, usually the home page. Although the intent is not to manipulate search engines, there are also people who try to merge all the link 2.4bn to one page to make the page more powerful. This would sometimes put a banner on Google, which might come to the point.

Matt Cutts also talked about this in webmaster Tools.

When to use 301

Migrating Web Sites

If you want to migrate your site to a new domain name or replace your URL with a new URL, you should use the 301 jump. In this case, you don't want users or search engines to see your old site, especially if the move is due to a new design or structure change. Google gives clear guidelines and recommends using 301 redirects in this case.

Expired, expired content

You should use 301 if you have outdated content on the site such as terms and conditions, old goods or news no longer relevant or no longer useful to your users. Here are some things to remember when you remove old content from the site.

Check your site analysis to see if the old content to be removed is also getting traffic from the search engine, if the answer is yes, would you mind removing the content and losing some traffic?

Are there any other pages on the site that have similar content that you are browsing for? If so, use 301 jumps to point to similar pages so that you can keep the opportunity to get traffic.

Will this content become useful in the future? For example, do you have an ecommerce site that wants to remove a product that no longer sells, and does this product have a chance to go back to the shelves later?

Multiple home page versions

Here's a common mistake. The potential homepage URL can be accessed in several different ways, depending on how the site is structured.

Http://mz6.net

Http://www.mz6.net

Http://www.mz6.net/index.html

If the home page can be accessed through these different URLs, they need to redirect to the correct URL using 301, in which case the correct URL will be www.mz6.net.

Warning: The only exception is if the different versions of these home pages have only one purpose, if they will be displayed to the user who has already logged in or have deleted the cookie, in this case you'd better use rel=canonical instead of 301.

(because the post is too long than the word limit, it is divided into two parts published)

When and how to use the Rel=canonical label

Rel=canonical is a relatively new tool for SEO to use, it was first proposed in February 2009, wow this is really a long time ago yes?

As I suggested before, we have a lot of problems in q&a that are around the canonical tag. We have a lot of scary stories. Someone put all the pages on the canonical tag to the home page (as Dr Pete did), and Google noticed this very quickly and almost deleted all the index pages. That's surprising, Google says they may have noticed the label but don't guarantee it. But the experiment showed that most of the time they noticed the label, although sometimes the label was not repetitive.

When to use Rel=canonical

Where to use 301 is inappropriate

In some unfortunate cases, 301 redirects can be very tricky, and perhaps the site developer doesn't know how to do it (I've seen this) and maybe the CMS won't let you. In short, the situation does appear. Technically a rel=canonical tag is easy to implement because it does not involve what the server side does. It's just a label for the edit page.

Rand described this very well in his first rel=cannonical article:

Different ways to navigate the page

This is a common problem encountered by some large e-commerce sites, and some categories and subcategories are grouped in URLs, such as you might see

Www.phoneshop.com/smartphone/3G

Www.phoneshop.com/3G/smartphone

In theory, these pages can return the same result set, so there will be duplicate content. A 301 may not be appropriate when you want to keep the same URL address that users click on to navigate through the pages of the category navigation. So a rel=canonical would be better in this scenario.

URLs generated in Run

I mean URLs are generated from the database driver, and very large programs depend on how users use the navigation features on the site. A typical example is that session IDs is different for each user, and adding 301 jumps is not practical. Another example is to add a trace code at the end of the URL to monitor the access path or some clicks. Like what:

Www.example.com/widgets/red?source=footer-nav

When is it not suitable to use rel=canonical

On the new website

I have seen some examples of rel=canonical used on some newer websites. This is probably not the original intention of the label design, if you are fortunate enough to help plan the structure of a new site, seize the opportunity to ensure that you can avoid duplication of content. Make sure they don't happen in the first place, so you don't need to use the rel=canonical tag.

At the paging--perhaps! At least use caution

This is a tricky question, unless you really know what you're doing, I'll avoid using the Rel=canonical tab in the paging page. For me, there is no complete duplicate page and you may potentially prevent Google from crawling the deeper product pages on the site. This seems to have been confirmed by John Mu in Google Webmaster Forum. He gives interesting solutions such as using JavaScript based navigation for users and loading all products onto one page.

From the entire station to a page

In short, it's a way to use rel=canonical tags that might hurt you. As I mentioned earlier, Dr Pete did this experiment almost by K dropped the whole station. He put the rel=canonical tag on the entire site to point to his home page, resulting in Google deleted a large number of included pages. The following snapshot from Google Analytics basically sums up the effect:

Original address: Http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

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