SEO Cname versus 301 redirect

Apr 22, 2022 | SEO Guide | 0 comments

While searching on Google, some page results appear on SERPs as 404 errors. It is a bad user experience because the page title that suited your search did not find any results. It shatters expectations related to this search result. Here is when redirects become relevant. A 301 redirect is when you tell google that you have a new domain name and want to shift traffic to this new domain name. It may take a few days to complete the process. 301 redirect could be thought of as changing an address. 301 redirect is a reliable source to shift traffic by redirecting from one URL to another. Another way is to make a CNAME record that maps a domain name to another Canonical domain name(CNAME). So, for SEO 301 redirects or CNAME, what will you choose?

SEO CNAME records versus 301 redirects

With Cname records you can map URLs as an alias to the canonical domain. It means if the IP address map to that canonical domain name changes, the Cname records will work because these point to the root domain. It is resourceful when running multiple services from single IP. For example, food.example.com is a domain name as an alias to CNAME flavor.example.com. If you have three different URLs. Awebsite.com, www.awebsite.com, and Awebsite.io. The first URL would be a canonical domain that points toward your site’s IP address. When you set up a Cname record that redirects the 2nd to 1st domain. Whereas you have a third name registered for which you may create a 2nd record that redirects 3rd to 1st domain. However, a canonical name must always be a domain name and not another IP address.

CNAME Set up

To set up a record to point a www.url.com towards its canonical domain. For this, Go to the domain tab and click DNS and scroll down to the Cname section. Here, you have options for different setups. Once you click to add a record that is www. and point to example.com which is the canonical domain. Whereas a TTL option shows how often you should update a DNS record. It shows time options such as 4 hours as a minimum time to 7 days maximum time. Then, you click to create records. It is crucial to remember that you can set up multiple Cname records as per needs.

301 redirect

Whereas the 301 redirects are different in a way that you shift the URL and ranking of one domain to another. Because sometimes business owners run more than one website and they wish to shift traffic from one URL to another URL. It is also because one URL contains more updated information than the previous URL and thus can attract more traffic.

Here is when 301 redirect becomes relevant for shifting traffic from one source to another source. For example, there are two URLs XYZ.com, and xz.com. You want Google to shift traffic from the first to the second source. Here, using 301 redirects will permanently shift traffic from one URL to another.

In the image, you can see how 301 is redirecting all relevant traffic resources from the old domain to the new domain. It is when SEO works making the second domain also a reliable source because the idea of traffic is related to ranking. It is crucial to remember that the process of redirecting may take some time. Because the search engines will take some time to find 301, and process the redirect. However, this process may take more time if search engines rarely visit the targeted web page. But once the web page is redirected from one URL to another, it will redirect the traffic, and ranking of the previous URL. There are other redirects such as 302 and 307 where 302 is a temporary redirect. But 301 is a permanent redirect. So, for SEO the 301 redirect works best as shifting traffic from one domain to another will increase the traffic and thus potential clients. If you have more updated information on the new domain URL, your web page will likely have a chance to become visible on search results.

Conclusion

Hence, the major difference between the CNAME record and 301 redirects is that Cname only changes one domain name to another within the same IP address. It does not redirect anything. Whereas the 301 redirects traffic and thus ranking that helps to increase the scope of business.