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

Hey Matt. I had a lingering question about using rel=canonical vs. 301 redirects. It takes longer for Google to find the rel=canonical pages but 301 redirects seem to lose impact (link juice) over time. Is there similar churn with rel=canonical? Sam Crocker, London, UK

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[Dave James]

Implementing rel canonical tags has been less of a hassle than it initially seemed it would be and has been highly beneficial.

[jaymarpielago]

thanks a lot on your discussion. I learn a lot of things.

[Marco Varela]

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.

[crockheel]

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.

[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.

[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?