Today's question comes from San Francisco, California.
Dan asks in the 2009 Rel Canonical video, you suggest using Rel Canonical when we can't use a 301 redirect, but three and one's heard performance.
They require browsers to make an extra round trip to my server.
Shouldn't I use Real Canonical everywhere instead of three or one?
Well, you are the master of your domain, so you can choose whether you use a 301 or whether you use Rel Canonical.
That's your call most of the time, though, I would recommend using a 301.
That's because everybody knows how to deal with it.
Browsers know how to deal with it all search engines pretty much know how to deal with it.
If there's some new little startup, they might not know how to deal with Rel Canonical if they're doing their own search engine, for example.
And the other thing to keep in mind is usually when you're doing a 301, it's because you're going to some new place on your site.
But you're typically not doing a 301 on every single interaction that your browser has.
Normally, it'll be your browser land somewhere, you do a 301 to the new location, and then that functionality just continues just fine.
So it's usually a one time hub.
It's not like it's a huge amount of extra work.
The other thing is, if you're moving to a new location, your users will look at the address bar and they'll notice where they are.
And so they want to have a good model of where they are on their site.
So there's a lot of good cognitive kind of reasons and reasons why it might make sense to use a three one.
It's just well supported.
Everybody knows how that works.
So all other things being equal, I sort of recommend 301 unless you really can't get around to maybe you don't have access to the web server or something like that, and then it's totally fine.
User El Canonical It doesn't hurt if you prefer to really go with Rel Canonical, it's just three ones are a little more supportive.
People understand them.
And so that's what I would recommend is the first pass.
But if you're a power user and you really want to do things the way that you understand on your own site, you absolutely can use Rail Canonical instead.