Hey folks, what do you think when you hear the word Duplicate Content?
I know what would be the reaction of SEO guys now, People in digital marketing knows how bad are duplicate content for your blog or website. Basically for any search engines like google or yahoo , duplicate contents is not a negative signal . if you use the same content in another page of your website, then search engines will feel difficult to rank for which page the weight-age and ranking factors should be given and there might be problems in ranking too.
So in order to overcome this duplicate content you can use 301 redirects or canonical tag. Both are effective if you use those in the right place and in the correct way. Here in our blog let’s see canonical and 301 redirects in detail.
While taking on page sessions for a website, meta tags, title, description, heading tags has some particular conditions and recommendations. When you are in a situation to use canonical tag or 301 redirects, then it would be always a problem for webmasters to choose the right one for the right target.
Canonical Tag:
You are having two identical pages but with two different URL’s. Canonical tag is used to signal the search engines about which pages to index. Still another page also get crawled but the weight-age will be for the page which u signaled the search engines.
Head section of a web page is the place where the canonical tag is implemented. When search engine crawler visits a website, it looks for the canonical tag and index the page for which canonical tag is implemented. And then crawls the next page of the website. Canonical tag refers to the same page in order to prevent plagiarized websites. When content is getting repeated or else when unique URL could not generated, canonical tag is used.
Now let’s take a example for the detailed and simple understanding of this canonical tag
You have two identical pages for two different URL’s. www.example.com/music and www.example.com/musics . so now you are implementing canonical tag as
301 Redirects:
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect of a web page to another different URL. But most of the users are not aware or does not notice such redirects, but this 301 redirects link strength is almost 100 percent. When there is a URL change or else if there are any error pages and when user friendliness getting affected or else to avoid duplicate content this 301 redirects can be used.
.htaccess is important in 301 redirects. Website owners adjusts this .htaccess so that the url that should be permanently redirected will be deposited in the server.
The Process:
Crawler or browser sends a URL requests to a server
Server compares and matches the request to .htaccess
.htaccess now redirects the URL permanently to the different URL
The implementation for a URL http://example.com to be permanently redirected to http://www.example.com would be like this
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com /$1 [L,R=301]”
Hope you all got a clear idea of what a canonical tag and a 301 redirect is, if i have missed anything please do drop your valuable advice and comments in the comment section.