AskSEO questions today can be found in Real Estate Photo Editing SEO forums, private groups, or in-person social gatherings (remember?). "When do I need to use canonical tags instead of 301 redirects?" This is a great question. Not only because the answer is "it depends on the situation", but also because many SEO experts seem confused. Before we dive in, we need to understand the difference between 301 tags and canonical tags. 301 redirect A 301 redirect is Real Estate Photo Editing a way to permanently move one URL to another. From the user's point of view, entering one URL magically retrieves another.
The original URL doesn't load the content, it Real Estate Photo Editing just redirects you to the new location. Most ways to do this will incur a slight load time delay, but with a CDN and caching, and the latest technology, you really don't have to worry about it. There are tons of different ways to implement a 301 redirect . advertisement Continue reading below If you are using Apache, you can run them in your file. It's a little different for Windows hosting. You can Real Estate Photo Editing also redirect in code using a scripting language, but it's best to redirect at the . level if possible. The various ways to redirect are beyond the scope of this article. Regular tag Regular tags have been around for a long time. It's approaching my 12th birthday, but SEO pros are still struggling to use it, and non-SEO pros are still struggling to pronounce it. The main purpose behind canonical tags is to allow webmasters to specify preferred URLs for pages that are similar to another page.
Think about the "print version" of a page, or Real Estate Photo Editing the page sorting feature. Regular tags are very useful in these situations. We'll talk more about this later. The canonical tag is in the <head> section of your website. advertisement Continue reading below Legitimate tags in the body of a web page are not respected (if you have them, you can Real Estate Photo Editing enjoy a lot of black hats) Regular tags are simple. link href Some websites place canonical attributes inside meta tags or other tags. I don't know if it works or why you want it, so do as above. Canonicals and Redirects This section describes redirects so that you ca