Is link juice passed through a 301 and a canonical tag?

[Further]

Hi all,

I am led to believe that link juice does not pass through more than one 301 redirect, however what about a 301 and then a canonical meta tag? Here is an example:

subdomain.site.com/uk/page/ -> 301 -> **www.**site.com/uk/page/

www.site.com**/uk/**page/ -> canonical -> www.site.com/page/

Thanks,
Chris

[onlinetrend]

Since this message is from 2012 ... and the initial question is similar to mine, I hope it is ok to pick it up again in combination with subfolder searchresults on mobile.

We are moving a website from Shoptrader to Magento, which has 45.000 indexations … yes shoptrader made a bit of a mess. Trying to clean it up now.

• there is a 301 redirect list of all old URL's pointing to the new
• one product can exist in multiple categories - want to solve this with canonical url’s
  but mostly redirecting from category/productname to category/category/productname

Her comes the problem:
New developer insists on using /productname as canonical instead of /category/category/productname … since Magento says so.

The idea is now to redirect to /category/category/productname and there will be a canonical URL on these pages pointing to /productname, loosing some link juice twice. So in the end indexation will take place on /productname … if Google picks it up the 301 + canonical.

My preference would be to point to one URL with categories attached ... since Mobile searchresults nowadays shows subfolders as well ... making it possible to show more than one result of your site. right?

What would you say?

[Further]

Hi guys, the country subfolders will serve the correct country content by ip and also be geo-targeted in WMT and on-page metas. All of the English speaking duplicate content will then be canoncialised into one root page, consolidating authority.

Cheers

[Matt-Williamson]

I agree - if you have setup your country specific subfolder properly with geo-targeting setup in webmaster tools then the duplicate content won't be an issue.

As long as Google can clearly assign a folder to a specific country when it crawls your site then you won't need to worry about adding another redirect or canonical link in my experience.

BUT it was clear from Chris' links that he was aiming for something like this, hence why I asked the question.

Chris if you are unsure what the best options for your international SEO are then I think this whiteboard friday is a good read for you - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

[Carlos-R]

I'm not sure geo-targeting (with webmasters tools or the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags) will work through 301s or canonicals.

You can set www.site.com/uk/page/ to geo-target the UK, but just because you redirect that page to www.site.com/page/ doesn't mean that www.site.com/page/ will now target the UK.

Maybe I'm just being thick  and don't get what you are trying to do

[Further]

"I guess Chris is doing this as a way to target specific countries?" - Correct

Thanks for the answers guys, thats perfect

[Matt-Williamson]

We must have been writing our responses at the same time - great minds eh Carlos. I agree with you about the fact that you could just redirect subdomain.site.com/uk/page/ -> to www.site.com/page/.

I guess Chris is doing this as a way to target specific countries?

[Matt-Williamson]

Daisy chaining 301 redirects will pass link juice but each time a 301 redirect happens you will loose a proportion of your link juice which is not ideal as you want to keep as much of your original link value as possible. I would go down the route of using a 301 redirect and then a canonical as the second part of your redirect is essentially showing your preferred page with duplicate content so would make most sense in my opinion.

[Carlos-R]

Link juice does pass through more than one 301 redirect, what happens is that every time it jumps through a redirect it loses a little bit of juice.

I'm sure you have a reason for it, but why can't you redirect subdomain.site.com/uk/page/ -> www.site.com/page/

Cheers