Hello Friends, Can anybody tell me what is the difference between 301 Redirect and Canonical Url? Thanks.
Dear Friend, 301 redirection is use for permanent redirection of Old Domain to new Domain, Redirection of non www to www URL. But Canonical URL to help you eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index with Canonical link Reference Tag. Canonical code is <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourdomain.com" /> its show if any content have multiple URL then its redirect to main URL. A 301 redirect re-points all traffic both for Bots and Human Visitors, the Canonical URL tag is just for Search Engines
Well put hoodaki. I will add a couple points though. For SEO purposes...... With a 301 redirect, any link juice & pagerank that the previous page had "should" eventually be passed to the new page. So if widgets1.html was a pr2 and you do a 301 rediect to widgets1.php, the benefit from the older page should pass to the newer page which would for the immediate future be an n/a. With canonical link a good example would be if you have an ecommerce store and your page is widgets.html and your site assigns a session id each time someone enters the site. If a bot comes to your site, it will cache the same page with multiple session ids making the url different, but the content on page the same. Specifying the canonical link will help avoid multiple identical pages being cached.
Better for what? They serve different functions. 301 is a permanent move. canonical is the actual url.