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Hi Carly,

if you want to know more or need further help: Bryan Dean's On-Page SEO Anatomy infographic serves as a good start.

You may also provide a more concrete example by a private message via my profile page. I can help you.

Hi,

1 authoritative way is to use Google's own tool in Google Webmaster Tools, under "Crawl" you'll see "Fetch as Google". If the tool returns "redirected" as the page's status you may resubmit it to the index

See more at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066467?hl=en and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?hl=en

Edit: or you can use the Crawl Tool right here on Moz.com: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

Hi Brad, you are right according to Brian Dean's extensive list of 200 Google ranking factors:

Although Google prefers fresh content, an older page that’s regularly updated may outperform a newer page.

I am hesitant to recommend doing the 301 redirect, even though it is the right thing to do. Google Support does state at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en#4

To address these issues, we recommend you define a canonical URL for content (or equivalent content) available through multiple URLs. You can do this for Google Search in a number of ways:

It goes ahead to recommend both setting a canonical URL and updating your sitemap and, after that, doing a 301 redirect. So it seems both work. It depends on whether you want to keep the older link accessible, in which case a canonical URL will do the trick or if not, then the 301.

Before doing the 301 redirect I would do a more extensive analysis of both of these pages. Perhaps with the tools that Moz Pro provides right here. There probably are unseen factors.

PS! The Google Support link above also answers your question of what is the best practice.