They say history repeats itself. In the case of the great 301 vs 302 vs rel=canonical debate, it repeats itself about every three months. And in the case of this Whiteboard Friday, it repeats once every two years as we revisit a still-relevant topic in SEO and re-release an episode that's highly popular to this day. Join Dr. Pete as he explains how bots and humans experience pages differently depending on which solution you use, why it matters, and how each choice may be treated by Google.
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Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans, it's Dr. Pete, your friendly neighborhood marketing scientist here at Moz, and I want to talk today about an issue that comes up probably about every three months since the beginning of SEO history. It's a question that looks something like this: Aren't 301s, 302s, and canonicals[1] all basically the same?
So if you're busy and you need the short answer, it's, "No, they're not." But you may want the more nuanced approach. This popped up again about a week [month] ago, because John Mueller on the Webmaster Team at Google had posted about redirection for secure sites, and in it someone had said, "Oh, wait, 302s don't pass PageRank."
John said, "No. That's a myth. It's incorrect that 302s don't pass PR," which is a very short answer to a very long, technical question. So SEOs, of course, jumped on that, and it turned into, "301s and 302s are the same, cats are dogs, cakes are pie, up is down." We all did our freakout that happens four times a year.
So I