Redirects & Canonical. What’s The Difference?

There is a lot of confusion about the difference between setting redirects and canonicalization. Here’s the deal.

What a 301 says to search engines.

Hello, Mr. Search Engine. My page has has moved, permanently, to this other address. If you will please remove my old domain from your index and push everything through to this new one including all credit and “link juice”.

What Canonical says:

Hiya Mr. Search Engine. There happen to be multiple version of this page that you’re currently indexing. So there may be a lot of duplicate content. Could you please index only this page so that the other pages do not interfere with my rankings or how my site displays on your search results.

That’s the gist of it. Canonical links are often used wrong – there needs to be a situation where you have multiple pages with the same, or very similar content. With 301, the common mistake is to set it during a temporary move. It needs to be permanent. For temporary, use 302.

More Web Design Blog Content

Even More Internet Marketing Success

We’ve been working with attorneys all over town. None more than Fisher, Butts, Sechrest and Warner. They’re great folks located over in Haile. They have a successful law firm and are enjoying much success online. When we met, they were basically nowhere online … maybe somewhere back on

What You Should be Asking

When hiring a developer, many people don’t know what questions they should be asking – if they knew, then they’d probably be doing the work themselves, right? First and foremost – ask for examples of previous projects. The surefire way to weed out the novices is to look

New Web Program: Brain Development Maps

Creating braindevelopmentmaps.org was a great opportunity to work on a very interesting site; Shirley came to Livewire with very specific needs. There is nothing ‘typical’ or ‘standard’ about this website, it is in a word, unique. Braindevelopmentmaps.org allows users to view highly detailed brain mapped images online. These

Website Redesign Launch: Precon Tanks Gets a Modern Upgrade

We’re excited to announce the launch of the brand-new website for Precon Tanks — a leading manufacturer of precast concrete tanks and systems for the wastewater and stormwater industries. With decades of expertise and a reputation for quality and dependability, Precon needed a website that reflected their technical

Session Timeouts

We’re currently fixing a set of issues with a shopping cart created through a different developer for a local client. They did a pretty good job but forgot about session timeouts. A lot of developers gloss over this aspect of their ecommerce site and unfortunately customers pay the

Domain names other than .com a good idea?

Top Level Domains (TLDs), which are suffixes, are the final part of URLs. Although.com is well-known, there are more than 1,000 TLD choices available; however, not all of them are open to the general public. Prior to TLDs, IP addresses were used to visit websites, however this proved