How rel=canonical differs from 301 redirection?

For stepping-up the relevancy and accuracy of results it return, search engines will go any extent, probably sky is their limit here. On regular basis they’re in the constant effort logically and algorithmically, to improve indexing and listing of sites . ‘301 redirection’ is one such good practice takes you out from the duplication danger. But it will not a favourable choice in all cases. Recently the three search engine giants (Google, Yahoo and Bing) worked together and came up with a highly-honed solution badged as “rel=canonical”. But “rel=canonical” is not a complete alternative to the 301 redirection as 301 redirection have its own unique advantages which “rel=canonical” can’t cater. So now webmasters are having more control over their website towards the duplication issues in search engines. Considering their needs webmaster can either go with “rel=canonical” or opt “301 redirection”. I hope the following points will make you clear about how “rel=canonical” differs from 301 redirection.

Only Internal not external

“rel=canonical” works within the domain and don’t out of the domain. You can sort out the duplication issues in your website with this tag. You cannot have a preferred page out of your domain with this method. If you want to have your preferred page out of your domain then you should go for 301 redirection. In all the duplicates (ugly URLs) of a page within your site, you just need to add the preferred location in the header part as follows: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/page.html”/>

Don’t take user to the nice URL

Rel=canonical don’t take user to the preferred page. If you want to take both user and search engine to the nice URL, then you should go for 301 redirection. If you want to take only the search engine and not user to nice URL, then you should go for “rel=canonical”. With rel=canonical you can take the advantage of showing different content to user and not to search engines.

Sits in header tag

Rel-canonical tag will be in the header tag. It’s not going to eat much of your time to implement. Also you need not to worry about the server and language used where 301 redirection has to be applied according to the server and language used. Rel=canonical is a good idea to implement and sort out the duplication issue within the website.

Also I just wanted to discuss about the similarities between the rel=canonical and 301 redirection.
Both these duplication handling features have more or less similar effect. “Rel=canonical” will pass all the back link juice and other weightages to the preferred URL same like 301 redirection. All other URLs except the preferred URL will get removed from the search engine index and guides search engines to take only the preferred URL.