Is there an advantage to using rel="canonical" over a 301 redirect?

What people said

Cites Ilmari Karonen · 2012-02 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Will I preserve link equity if I use two redirects?”

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Sure, in principle, the less redirects the better — but in practice, any bot or browser that can follow one redirect can certainly follow two, and the PageRank loss from redirects is minimal [this video] . Just do whatever works for you. (In fact, as far as I know, no-one's confirmed that there's any PageRank loss from redirects within a site. Matt Cutts did confirm in an interview [LINK] that 301 redirects can lose a small amount of PageRank, but that was in the context of cross-domain redirects.) (Update: It has since been confirmed that, while 301 redirects may have lost some PageRank in the past, that doesn't happen any more [LINK] . Go ahead and redirect a

Cites John Conde · 2013-04 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How do I transition to SSL without affecting PageRank?”

Your proposed solution is the best way forward from an SEO perspective. You avoid duplicate content by using the canonical URL and the 301 redirect will transfer most of your PageRank ( a small amount is lost in the redirect [this video] ). Plus thanks to the strength of Stack Overflow's pages in Google I would be more then stunned if you saw any fluctuations in your rankings. Smaller sites would see a transition period in their rankings while Google got caught up with their new URLs but I don't forsee that happening to Stack Overflow. FYI, John Meuller, the Google employee you quoted, is an active member here [LINK] . With a little luck he'll give us his perspective on this.

Cites heytools · 2013-07 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Is it correct to redirect useless "?" URLs to cleaner URLs”

This is not about redirecting /index.php?id=6252 to /category-name . It's about redirecting: /category-name?ref=blabla&something=useless-stuff /category-name? /category-name???????? to: /category-name in a small website that does not use GET methods at all. I have never seen this technique used (or discussed) anywhere, even Google allows you to visit: [LINK] (PR=0) instead of: [LINK] (PR=9) I don't like adding extra HTML tags (i.e. canonical) or HTTP headers to my website, so I thought why not this? My biggest fears though is that search engines wouldn't appreciate it. I just came to this question but it doesn't add much, I'm not planning to share URLs with extra parameters: Google adds usel

Cites Nicolas Guérinet · 2015-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Use rel=canonical or 301 redirect”

Without 301 redirects, two same pages could be considered like a duplicate for some search engine (there is a life out of google search engine). On the other hand, if you create 301 redirects, any search engines will understand the target page. Still canonical is useful because sometimes bots & scripts add variables like: myvar=blabla at the end of the url. I think about the case when your page can be displayed with the same content from a different url with a variable at the end and you are not aware of it. Canonical ensures that any bots will understand the real url. Consequently, i think both 301 redirects and canonical are important because they are different (see answer from Rishi) Neve