Canonical vs 301 - Web Development

[mattdinbrooklyn]

So I'm having a conversation with the development team at my work and I'm a little tired today so I thought I would ask for other opinions. The currently the site duplicates it's full site by having a 200 show with or without a trailing slash. I have asked for a 301 redirect to with the trailing slash. They countered with having all the rel=canonical be the trailing slash, which I know is acceptable. My issue is that while a rel=canonical is acceptable, since my site has a very high level of competition and a very aggressive link building strategy, I believe that it may be beneficial to have the 301 redirect. BUT, I may be wrong. When we're talking hundreds of thousands of links, I would love to have them directly linked instead of possibly splitting them up between a duplicate page that has a correct canonical. I'm curious to what everyone thinks though....

[DannyHoodless]

301 Redirects are primarily designed for more permanent complicated jobs.

• Expired content
• Multiple versions of homepage
• Change of site

Canonical tags are a better way of telling Google that a query or slash is serving the exact same page content and is just a variation of the URL. Neither if done correctly will have a negative effect on the SEO, however using the canonical tag is far easier and appropriate.

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

[LoganRay]

In some cases, implementing a self-referring 301 redirect may cause an infinite loop in which your homepage would not be accessible at all, so I can understand your dev team's reluctance.

A canonical tag and a 301 redirect pass the same amount of link authority, so in this case, they serve the same purpose and provide the same benefit. I'd stick with the canonical tag and pick a different, more valuable battle to fight.

[GlobeRunner]

When it comes to the trailing slash on website URLs, the proper way is to use a 301 Permanent Redirect. However, you can help minimize this problem by fixing all of the internal links on the site so that you always link internally to the version that you prefer.

[EGOL]

Going straight to the root.    There are two versions, with and without slash, because someone started using them.  So the first thing that needs to be done is to decide which one is dominant today and go with it.  Immediately thereafter, development team, bloggers, everyone is to be informed of the new form of your URL and be expected to use it.  Clean them up, get them off of the site.  It's time to stop being sloppy.  People who don't go with the company's method need to be reminded.

You will find disagreements on if you should use 301 or if you should use rel=canonical.

The advantage of a 301 is that it takes control and forces the URL that you want to the browser and bot.  In contrast rel=canonical is a "hint" to Google.  We know for a fact that google changes their mind about how they handle things and they will ignore variants of URLs for an awful long time.  This same problem exists with parameters.  Google provides parameter controls in your Search Console, however, if you have experience with them you will know that they are highly unreliable and take a long time to be picked up and partially obeyed.  So you can take control with 301 or use rel=canonical in combination with prayer.

I use 301s because I don't trust Google to do things my way and because once you start using 301s your problems will immediately be reduced in size because the versions of the URLs that you don't want to see will be permanently eliminated from the address window of the browser.  I am also pretty luck that the staff here knows how the URLs on our websites are standardized.

[DirkC]

+1 for Egol here. A canonical is just a request to Google - a 301 is a directive Google has to respect. I don't really understand why your technical team is making such a fuzz about it - enforcing the trailing slash (or not) is just 1/2 lines in your .htacess file. Check Stackoverflow

Dirk