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

[ealtamira]

i was going to do a rel canonical on a penalized page this week, but i was too lazy to figure it out with wordpress, so i just 301'd it.

[simplybindas3]

In those cases where you would want to show not-exactly identical versions of a page to the visitors and want to transfer all link juice to one version, 301 Redirect would not serve the purpose as 301 would redirect all versions to one particular page without giving chance to visitors to have a look at them. In those cases rel=canonical tag will be just fine.

[MrTVTL]

This seems a bit too generalist of an approach from a Google point of view. Not that I'm obsessed with PageRank or anything (I'm the last guy in the world to care a lot of the time), but if you have a CMS and you use it to clean up duplicate content (e.g. converting all URLs to lower case) and there's a clear case of consolidation for correction purposes going on, why should you be punished for that, even slightly? The same question occurs when a company rebrands itself, among others.

[crockheel]

@MrTVTL not to speak for Matt but it seems like it's not a true "punishment" so much as a necessary feature of the redirect to keep people from taking advantage of what would otherwise be a loop hole (i.e. people could exploit redirects rather than links to try and rank better). It's obviously an imperfect situation but I suppose gives folks reason to think twice about a rebrand/etc. and impact on their site.

[OptimizationTutor]

That is great news. So rel=canonical" can pass page rank from one domain to another? Does that mean we can put that in our content so when scrapers steal our content they will be secretly notifying Google where they stole the content from?

[ShawnKHall]

I think you've missed part of the intent of the question. That is, is it safe to even use tags/categories (in WordPress for example) with the full post content under the tag/category page - or would it be best to avoid duplication entirely?

[vrkaraja]

Thx info, makes tons of Sense. So when you have access to header modification, use 301, if you don't, then use rel=canonical.